Help with landmasses and textures
Danknanfrog
Newcomer
So I am making a map for DND and I am tracing an image. Apparently I made the map size too small. I wanted it about 6000km by 3800km and I put 6000 and 3800 in the map size when making it. This has lead to many problems such as the textures being really zoomed in because of the small map size. I know I can redraw the map with the resize tool but will I be able to make the landmasses ive drawn bigger? I havnent done too much and id rather sort out the issue early on. Also on the map there are parts that have islands and swamp around it. At one part the island is above the swamp background but on others only the landmass border is above the swamp background. Ive added a sheet called swamp but I think it still counts as landmass so is there a way to make it seperate. Thanks
Comments
Have you got a screen shot of what you mean?
I'm a bit confused because you are calling a map that is 6000 x 3800 map units small.
Textures can be scaled, if there is a problem there.
I have just resized the map up to 60000 and 38000 and the stuff I drew scaled fine. It is quite laggy compared to before, as expected. Do you think it would be fine if I resized it small and once I added all the rivers, mountains etc.
It sounds like you are trying to make a map that is city scale but world size. This is not a good idea.
Do you have a screen shot?
Sounds like your map size is perfect. If you want it to be 6000 by 3800 km, then 6000x3800 is the correct values for the dialog when you started the map. You'll always want the number of map units to match the actual real-world size of the map. If you used those numbers, you shouldn't resize anything, since it is already correctly scaled.
If you don't like the scaling of the fills, change the fills. You can do that from the fill style dialog, just click the fill style indicator in the top right, go to the bitmap files tab. select the appropriate fill, and change the value for scaled.
If you need to change the sheet an entity is on, just use Change Properties
on the entitie and put it on the correct sheet.
Edit: Seems I took a bit of time writing this, got ninja'ed by 3 comments :)
Sorry Remy :)
I think you were actually more helpful in the long run ;)
When I was making the map I selected metric then put the numbers in. Knowing I can scale the fill is very helpful. But when I put a sticker in it is quite large compared to the map. I don’t mind it as I can scale it but is there a way to do it so all of the stickers start in that scale because it might be off. Also when I was talking about the swamp being over the landmass, I right clicked on the landmass tool and searches swamp and clicked on that. I then traced the swamp area of the picture. I assume as they are both landmasses the one drew most recent goes to the top. The reason I did it like that is because I couldn’t make the swamp background go fractal mode as I don’t want it smooth. Is there a way to change that too because when I right click on it, it brings up all stickers and backgrounds for that theme. Thanks for the response aswell
And how do I change priority on stuff like if I want to make a section called islands and make that go beneath swamp background and mainland to go above , just as an example
That priority is the Sheets. The order of the sheets in the dialog is the drawing order, so if something is on a sheet further down the list, it will drawn after, and therefore on top of, things higher in the list.
You can always move things like the swamp to another sheet using Change Properties
after you have draw it if it isn't on the sheet you want it to be. The drawing tool places it on it's default sheet automatically, but you can move these entities around as you want.
By stickers, I assume you mean symbols? You can always change the scale of a symbol before placing it by right clicking inside the map (with the symbol at the cursor) to get the symbol properties dialog, or you can hold down control and move the mouse up down to change the scale visually. You can also set the default scale from the Drawing Properties
dialog, this is the scale it will use when loading the map, or hitting set defaults in the symbol properties dialog.
The fact that you are wanting to reduce the size of this leads me to believe that you might be attempting to draw a bit too detailed map. You should always be carefull how detailed you make a map, for several reason. Reason 1 is simply performance. Every entity you add to the map is another thing CC3+ needs to keep track of and draw. CC3+ isn't like a bitmap editor where you just change the color of the pixels, but the performance is the same with a blank image as with a pattern-filled one. Trying to add to much detail also makes the map look very cluttered and unreadable when you try to zoom out to look at the overview of the map. The second reason is mapping fatigue. Trying to map out a large map in very tiny detail is extremely time-consuming, and most people who have attempted that burtn out long before they get clode to finish. I allways recommend keeping the detail level at a reasonable level, and instead make additional higher-detail regional maps of the more interesting regions, rather than tackle everything at once. Kind of like we are doing it in the community atlas.
Thank you for explaining this to me.
Also do you know if I can scale down the fractal mode because to get a few points requires me to draw the landmass half way across the map.
You can change the fractal params on the fly when you are drawing. Look at the command line. Up/Down arrows control strength, while left/right controls depth (number of nodes being placed). If you get to few nodes, you'll want to increase depth a bit.
You can also edit the drawing tool itself to change the defaults it uses for the fractal function.
Be careful about the depth though. Just as with many entities, a very detailed polygon can also affect performance, and there are limits for how many nodes any given polygon can have. This is another reason why you shouldn't make a hugely detailed map as a single file.