Building Interiors on CC3+ Maps
Eogen
Newcomer
I searched and did not find this in the forums, I apologize if its already asked and answered.
I am looking to build a fantasy city map in the style of the classical Neverwinter City map by Schley. However, I am intending to blow up the scale in order to be able to use the city map to generate smaller sub-maps for use with a virtual table top.
What I really need to do is be able to draw the housing with entities that are smart enough to be shown "with roof" and "without roof" when extracted to a png or other static file type. Is that functionality that is supported by CC3+, or is what I am looking to do too "off topic" for the CC3 engine?
I already have purchased a large assortment of the CC3 content, specifically CC3+, City & Dungeon Designer, Perspectives, and both of the Schley templates.
Any pointers would be appreciated.
Answers
I'll also add that I am a complete Newb, and am slowly working my way through the novel by "Manuel", and the intro youtube videos, but I also don't want to invest a lot of time learning a steep-learning curve tool that won't, in the end, do what I am trying to do.
City styles aren't really made for showing interior details, so it doesn't work like that by default.
However,there isn't anything preventing you from drawing building interiors, and then but the building sheet on top of them. So, with the building sheet visible, it will cover up the floorplans and look like a normal city, and with the building sheet hidden, you will see the floor plans. All you need to do is to set up proper sheets to draw your floor plans on, and import the required fill styles into your map.
A word of warning here though, mapping the interior of every building in a large city is time consuming, and also results in a lot of entities that can cause CC3+ to slow down. You can avid the latter partially by making sure the interior sheet is hidden when it is not in use (as in actualy hidde, not just covered up by the buildings sheet). For a smaller place, this may work perfectly fine, but I don't recommend it for larger cities.
Instead, I would make some detailed sections of the city as maps like this.
Also note that CD3 can automatically take a building symbol and make a floorplan from it on it's own map. This map is then linked from the city map so you can just click on it to go to the floor plan map. This is the preferred way of making florplans for houses. Note that it only generates the outline of the floorplan, it won't greate a fully furnished plan for you.
The number of things this program can do that I either forget about or never glom onto is amazing. I didn't know until reading this thread that CD can generate linked floorplans straight from the map! What a cool feature!
I was going to suggest the floorplan option actually. Ralf did a live mapping subject on this exact subject.
Doing it for every building in a city would take forever but for major POI I feel it's the best way to go.
Thank you to everyone who replied. Let me try to be more specific about what I am trying to achieve. What I want to do is lay out a city map, with streets and buildings, using the CC3+ functionality that I have seen that places buildings automatically, randomly, along roads.
I would like to be able to generate an "Entire City" image that includes the roofs, but a block-by-block set of images that include walls/windows/doors for the same building patterns. These smaller area/larger resolution images would then be fed into my VTT of choice.
Then the interior fixtures, furniture, items, etc. would then be added in the VTT (so as to be movable entities). I would also like to be able to add the roofs over top of the buildings within the VTT, so that the roof could be removed when the party explores/enters the buildings, exposing the floor layout.
So I do not expect CC3+ to be able to track all of the entities that would make up the contents of every building. And I also do not expect to be using CC3+ to click into a building, or other advanced linking functionality.
Basically, I would want to auto-draw the exterior shapes of the walls (not roofs) of the buildings, and also be able to generate a "whole city" map image with roofs instead of the walls. In my mind, this might be possible if I were to make a set of building images using standard shapes that correspond to the Schley City Pack roof images, and then overlay a roof layer (or whatever the CC3+ non-layer layer term is) and manually re-ceiling each of the buildings. But I was hoping for a more automated solution that would relate the roofs automatically to the buildings.
I wonder if such a thing would be possible by auto-generating the road/building paths, and then changing the properties of the buildings from a "roof set" to a "wall set"?
Try Random Cities (issue 126, Annual 2017), or Watabou cities (issue 157, Annual 2020) for automatic city generation
While there are tools to help you easily/automatically draw a city, there isn't a way to automate the drawing of the walls. A normal city is seen from above, so you see what you refer to as the roof drawing.
But for making the "interior" view, you will need to draw the walls/windows yourselves. The house symbols doesn't have removable roofs that reveal readily-made interior. It is easy enough in CC3+ to hide the roofs (or more accurately, hide the building symbols) to reveal what's beneath, but you will need to draw that beneath part yourself, otherwise you would just stare at a blank area.
I guess you could use the automatic floorplan generation to help you with this. When you generate a floor plan from a house (only works with proper CD3 symbols), a separate drawing is created with the walls of that building. Those walls could then be copied back to the main city drawing and placed under the house so that they are revealed when hiding the house. It will be some manual work doing this, but it at least gives you the building outline for free
If you need examples, there are several submitted maps in the Atlas thread at the top of the forums. Different sizes, different types.