Copying or Isolating Areas on Large Maps to Individual Maps?

ScottA

Ok, so I thought I knew how to do this... but I was wrong. What I'm looking to do is to take each individual country from the large continent map I created and isolate them so that I can now go in and enlarge and detail each one with things like cities, roads, small rivers and other things which do not appear on a large-scale continent map. I know how to copy and paste items between maps, but that doesn't work for this. I want to either be able to copy or cut out chunks from my finished continent map and paste or copy them onto new maps for each country or just isolate each country on copies of the main map and delete everything else around it. Something so that I end up with individual map files for each country. Whichever is the best way to do it? I looked through both the Tome and past discussions here, but I'm not even sure what the technical term/command for this is, so I sort of looked around the best I could but found nothing that helped.

JimP

On my phone but search in here for

Large map to small.

ScottA

It doesn't sound like any of that will help me, from the couple topics I found. The whole tracing thing is out of the question. I know how to do that and do it when I import into CC3+ from FT. But In this case, with a large continent and 40-50 individual countries, tracing is not going to be feasible. Plus then I'd have to try to somehow add in all the land features, fills, etc. from the original large map so that they all pretty much matched up again. Would never work.

Maybe I am misunderstanding, but is there no way just to cut or copy a block from one map to another? When I attempt copy/paste the cursor, of course, catches the whole of the land mass, so I end up with the entire map again.... Or to just cut/trim/delete everything back to leave one block of a map? That would work for me if I had to do it that way.

JimP

I don't trace. I just use the rectangle part on as a guide. So instead of saving the entire map as a png. I save as a rectangular png section. There is also a method detailed in either the manual or the tome. The Tome/manual method is a not copying the map part to a second cc3+ instance and trimming it down.

Cresta was done this way. A hemisphere with oceans continents and nations named And a few mountain ranges. Then a rectangular section of part of that of one cintinent. More details added. Then a kingdom on that continent. Now cities and rivers are added. Etc. That is how I did the northern hemisphere of Crestar.

I have made square and rectangular maps. It might be too difficult to make a map that follows the curve of a nation as long border that isn't a straight line.

Typed in using my cell pjone.

Monsen

CC3(+) can't copy partial entities, so you need to copy the entire entities over, and then use the Break, Split and Trim tools to remove the parts of the entities that extends beyond your new map border. When you Break/Split a polygon, it will temporary be reduced to a line, meaning it won't be filled anymore while working on it, but once you have removed the parts outside the map border, you can return it to a polygon again using the Path to Poly command (right click explode) and it will get back the filled appearance.

ScottA

Thanks, JimP and Monsen. The problem is that I obviously still have a little of that typical Photoshop/Gimp-style art program mentality, and I should know by now that CC3+/CAD drawings are a completely different animal, polys vs area.

Not sure whether it would be easier to do the break/split/trim thing or just copy each country's border and symbols onto a new map and then put fills back in. Either way sounds like an awful lot of work that I hadn't expected but again is my own fault for not taking the whole CC3+/CAD thing into account earlier and stupidly relying on old standard art program thinking.

Monsen

Posted By: ScottANot sure whether it would be easier to do the break/split/trim thing or just copy each country's border and symbols onto a new map and then put fills back in.

I am not sure what you are thinking here? Even if you copy the borders over, you still need to break and trim them to fit the new map.

The whole procedure isn't that difficult though, but it does take a little bit of practice, but once you get the hang of it, it is usually pretty quick.
Also, note that an alternative to breaking and trimming, you can also use trace, that is pretty quick and painless. Generally, I use a combination of tracing and trimming.

I recommend having a look at the editing with drawing tools chapter in the CC3+ user manual, especially the trace section of it. It goes over the basics of how to create a detail map from another map, and if you have the Tome, there is a more in-depth tutorial there.

You can also make CC3+ do some of the trimming work for you ny using the cut menu. Just type CUTMENUON on the command line, CC3+ should give you a confirmation dialog, and after restarting CC3+, you will have a brand new Cut menu with some tools. Do note that when it cuts a polygon, it will be reduced to a line as I described above, the filled are won't reappear untill you turn this line back into a polygon with the path to poly command.

JimP

Back on my computer.

While it does seem like lots of work, I have made over 2,000 maps using the save as rectangular section png, and importing it into a new map, then use it as a guide. I've made around 3,500 maps using CC2/CC3/CC3+ over the years.

ScottA

Ah... okay. Again, misunderstanding on my part. I was thinking of "trace" as what you do when you import a FT image into CC3+ and then manually trace it in, NOT the Trace command. Duh! Sorry. Bit thick at times. Yes, having gone through the tutorial in the Tome (don't know why I didn't remember that -- I HAVE read the whole Tome! Information overload, I suspect -- sometimes I feel like the more I learn about CC3+ the less I know!). NOW I see what you are talking about and understand it. That's the ticket. That's what I was looking for. Thanks so much for the direction and patience!

JimP

You're welcome.

Took me awhile to. So don't let the learning curve stop you.

taustinoc

It isn't a learning curve so much as a learning cliff. But it's well worth the climb, and there's always somebody around to hand you a piton when you need one.

JimP

Hmmm... Cliff ? Maybe you are headed off in the wrong direction. I make it North by NorthEast.

ScottA

Oh, sometimes it feels like a cliff when you just can't seem to comprehend or get a command to work, or figure something out. But then suddenly there's that "ah ha!" moment when it all makes sense and works. Again, I would suspect that the majority of the problems new folks have is that they have to unlearn standard graphic program thinking and learn CAD commands. That was my biggest hurdle and still catches me from time to time (as seen on my latest thread!).

taustinoc

Posted By: ScottAAgain, I would suspect that the majority of the problems new folks have is that they have to unlearn standard graphic program thinking and learn CAD commands.

I gotta agree with that. The user actions are kind of reversed. Instead of selecting an object, then applying a tool to you, you select a tool, then select the objects to apply it to. If you're doing something simple with a single object, it's the same, only confusing. But if you need to update a bunch of stuff at once, it's far more efficient.

The cliff comment was that, for me, I couldn't do much until suddenly, it call came together and everything was obvious. (Everything basic, that is. One could work with CC for years and never master all of it.)

ScottA

It took me a few tries, but I think I got the hang of it now, and its pretty easy. Actually, I find the worst part is copying the various sheet effects between maps. Of course, new and special sheets come along in the Paste process, but sadly none of the effects on those sheets come with them, so its back and forth. That's really tedious.

Monsen

You can save the sheets and effects as a setting in the original map, and then load this setting in the new one. That will insert all the sheets and effects from the first map in one go.

When copying effects from an individual sheet, you are aware that you can select and copy all the effects from a single sheet in one go also, right, and not just one by one. For many sheets at once, I still recommend the method above though.

ScottA

Yes, I know you can copy all the effects from one sheet at a time. Wasn't aware of the setting thing, however. Not sure if that would be a help or not in this case, as there are many, many special sheets for single areas of my continent that I need in only one or two nation maps and not in all of them. Might be as time-consuming to go through and take out all the unneeded stuff as it is to copy over effects one sheet at a time. But it is something that I could see being very useful in other situations.

Speaking of that... is there a way to purge unused sheets like there is for layers (have never used that, so I'm not familiar with it beyond just seeing it in the layers pop-up)? That would be mighty useful for keeping things tidy.

Monsen

There is no way to directly purge unused sheets, but sheets without any content are not saved, so they will be gone from the drawing the next time you load it.

ScottA

Well, having broken my continent map down into its 50-something nations, I now feel like quite the old pro on the whole process! It really is quite easy once you know what you are doing (thanks, again, Mosen and JimP for the patience and direction). Again, the worst part was copying over all the specific sheet effects from the master map to each of the smaller maps and then putting the new sheets in the proper order in each smaller area map. Te-di-ous! But I whipped through it in a few days, so I guess that's really not too terrible. Now I'm in the process of going through each individual map and changing symbols to the proper scaler and filling in the gaps left by the shrinkage! That is a real grind, but it is what it is, I suppose! You suffer for your art or something like that?

Dogtag

It may not have to be too much of a grind. Check out this discussion about rescaling all the symbols in a map.

Hopefully that helps a little.

Cheers,
~Dogtag

ScottA

Hm... well, I use the Rescale Symbols in Map function, so it's easy enough but they all shrink and then I have to fill in mountain ranges, etc. I calculate symbol sizing as per page 58 of the Tome: map width of the new map divided by map width of the old map. That number ends up being the same as the symbols in the symbols menu bar of the new maps, too. That thread is interesting, but I must be missing something because when I apply that to a map nothing much changes and the symbols appear to remain about the same size as original.

Dogtag

D'oh, sorry. I thought that was the discussion that explained Scale Symbols in Map. Oh well, you know about it anyway, ha ha!