Sheet Effects stop working consistently
Hi all,
Working through CC3+ for the first time, been going through the tutorials for about 8-10 hours now. I have had the same kind of recurring issue in each of my attempts to make a map. After 30-40 minutes of mapping, without fail, my terrain textures will no longer repond to sheet effects. Coastlines, rivers, symbols, etc. seem to be unaffected.
In this example, you can see that the "Edge Fade, Inner" effect no longer affects the farmland texture I've laid out here. If I roll this map back to a previous autosave (where the edge fade effect is working) and place any symbol/road/etc, the effects break themselves again. I want to keep using CC3+, because I have a CAD background and it seems pretty useful, but this is difficult to work through.
Any thoughts?
Comments
Are your touching textures on the same sheet? If two touching textures are on the same sheer, the overlapping portions won’t be affected by the special effects. Your screen capture shows that you have separate sheets for different kinds of textures, which is intended to allow for these kinds of effects to occur. First step would be to make sure that your different textures, roads, etc. are on different sheets.
If they are on different sheets, I defer to other experts here to troubleshoot.
The two textures I have in the image are on the LAND sheet and TERRAIN GRASSLAND sheet. I just tested it with a fresh map, deliberately not changing anything relating to default sheets/sheet effects, and reproduced the issue. Wonder if I have a corrupted install, or if this is just a much harder software than I originally realized.
I’m pretty new to it myself, so I will defer to the experts. But if you upload the FCW file to this thread, that may help the experts troubleshoot it.
Farmland is on the Farmland sheet not the grassland.
Sometimes the sheet effects stop working for me as well, but I usually just need to hit apply again. It often happens after I undo something.
Another thing to try is to switch the effects off in the main dialog, apply them, then switch them back on again.
This appears to be the solution, thank you! Not sure if this is part of the user manual that I missed, but it works.
You're welcome :)
It's not part of the manual. Just something that keeps happening to me, but I do spend a lot of time really pushing the software hard when I'm working on new styles. When it happens to other people it's usually quite rare.
@Lee Talman you can create as many sheet terrain/land features or even sea as you want. I frequently use this feature to be able to superimpose effects. In this image you can see 3 new sheets: 2 of land effects (the ice is on top of the tundra, and the SEA LAKE to produce the lakes on the map using the "water" of the sea.
You can also calibrate the inner opacity (I usually use between 40 to 80%) so as not to have a "too harsh" effect, sometimes even with low opacity the effects can mix, sometimes causing a desired effect - there is no reference rule for me, I adjust as I go.
Once your new sheets are created, and when you select the new terrain/land features effect... sometimes the program "sends" you to the original sheet, so you need to check and sometimes change to the desired sheet. However, even doing this, sometimes it happens to me that the program insists and places "base" terrain/land features on the sheet.
So what you need to do is go to the "change features" button, select the effect and click ok, then you choose which sheet you want to send it to. Normally this selection is easier when "activate sheet effects" is turned off, because the edge is easy to select, when edge fade inner is activated, it is usually difficult for me to select the TERRAin sheet I want.
Cheers
I always start with the mountains when I make my maps. Some styles trees and icons go on the same Sheet = SYMBOLS, in other styles, for example Mike Schley, the trees always go on the SYMBOLS TREES sheet. This initially makes it difficult to "place symbols behind the mountains", so you can create symbols back or symbol trees back to automatically position them behind and give better depth to your drawing.
https://forum.profantasy.com/discussion/12585/working-fast-kinda-tutorial#latest
Hey @Lee Talman brother! Continuing the FCW map that I sent to you here on the Forum... opening the file you can see how I added several land effect SHEETS.
You can also notice how I placed the ROAD sheet almost under everything and added a small glow effect to highlight the sea.
This has been an excellent example for me to work from, thank you so much!