Why is my sheet effect disappearing?
JulianDracos
Mapmaker
So I created a lake and added an inner glow. It worked fine. Then, I noticed when I exported the map, that it was not on. I went back and turned the sheet effects on. However, it is not showing up. I thought it was because I drew a road across it for a trade route. I deleted that, and still nothing. For some reason, it only seems to show up when I zoom in. It does not do this all the time. Redraw doesn't seem to help.
My guess is that I did not have it sit right for the effect to be viewable zoomed out. Although it worked perfectly fine most of the day. I have attached the file since I am going to assume people will need that data to determine what is going on.
Comments
This is caused by an imperceivable color shift that causes the edge detection to fail. Change the color of your lake (the fill, not the black outline) to pure white (color 15), it is currently color 231 which is the same color as the background. That should take care of it.
Also note that your effect is specified as percent of view width instead of map units, which makes it change size as you scroll out and in. This can make it very thin and almost disappear on exports, especially high resolution ones.
Thanks. I am assuming I am doing something wrong. When I select the lake the change properties, if I change it to white, the outline goes away. Once it just went away and nothing else changed. The other time, the outline went away, but the sheet effect started to work again. So I guess I need to know how to just select the fill color and not the outline.
You need to use one of the selection techniques described in the editing chapter in the manual to select just the fill and not the outline. I prefer to first select both entities by clicking on the edge, then combining it with NOT Color 0 to remove the outline from the selection, but you can also use list on the entities and find their entity tags, and then do a select by entity tag to just pick the fill.
Great, that worked. And I learned a select skill that will be helpful in other areas.