Easier way to increase sample sizes of contours
So I am exporting a very mountainous region of my map from Fractal to CC3+ making a custom export with 50 meter intervals. however a ton of layers are the same colours. and confirmed they are there while selecting to delete is there an easier way to insert greater number of colors? I try to change them in Lighting and color but it drops to like 4-10 colours even when i put in 40 or 45 (default is 30)
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The colors output to cc3 from ft are the closest colors in the 256-color cc3 palette. Ft calculates the RGB color to be output for a given altitude and then finds the color in the cc3 palette with the smallest rgb distance to the requested one. Unfortunately, the number of colors in the cc3 palette is pretty small, with about 12 shades of each of about 16 hues. This limited choice of colors means there are likely to be just a few colors that actually end up in the cc3 output.
You should be able to make a custom palette in cc3 with more of the colors that you want to represent in the import, attach that palette to a cc3 drawing, and use that drawing as the basis for exports from ft.
Is there a tutorial for making custom palettes? I found some information about manually changing stuff in the export from FT but nothing really coming from CC3+
To simplify things a little, export a tiny file from FT3+, open it in CC3+, and delete the onscreen entities. This step is useful primarily to ensure that the drawing layout won't confuse FT3+; it should be able to handle any CC3+ drawing, but you might need to work with some sheet setup in the FT3+ export to ensure that everything is set as you'd like it to, and starting from an FT export reduces any possible need for setup.
On the CC3+ main toolbar, click the little color patch to select the current color. You'll get a dialog called Select Color. From that dialog, you can click on individual colors and set their RGB value to change the currently-loaded palette. After you click OK to accept the palette, use the File>>Drawing Properties menu item to ensure that the palette is attached to your drawing. The File>>Save As to save the drawing somewhere. Now exit CC3+ (you don't want CC3+ and FT3+ fighting over who gets to open the drawing file).
In FT3+, use File>>Save Campaign Cartographer File and select the export setting you'd like to modify. Click Edit to start editing the setting. Click the "Use Custom File" checkbox on the Introduction page of the wizard and pick the CC3+ file you attached the palette to. The continue on through the wizard, accepting the current settings. Now, when you save data from FT3+ using that setting, it should use the CC3+ file (including palette) that you attached the palette to and pick its colors from the modified version. If it doesn't, please let me know.
So what i did was zoom in on region map save as a basic contour map. Opened it in CC3+ deleted all the entities shown. clicked the colour swatch at the top of the window next to S: Land. Attempt top change colours. but doesn't seem to change the upper left swatches. But i make sure to save palate to drawing. I went back to FT3. and to save CC3+ file for map. When I select 100x800 file for it to use and choose my palate save it just crashes out. I assume I'm missing a step or perhaps file is to big for the listed 1000x800 file. i did attempt the same with the other already defined pallete templates and just deleting entities saving palate to drawing. and it still crashes FT3+
So I was able to get it working, just needing it to be in the templates folder. however The help menu doesn't really explain where color numbers mean beside 1-15, all the way to 31 i believe.
The CC3+ palette system dates back to when PC hardware supported 256 color frame buffers. Colors 0 to 15 should be assumed to be Windows system colors and colors 16-30 are mostly used to draw various elements of the CAD user interface such as drawing window background, selected entities, black, white, and so on. Color 31 is special and changes regularly and apparently unpredictably, so it's generally not a good choice to pick for drawing. That leaves you with colors 32 through 255 for your own use. The default palette colors in that range are reasonable generic choices, but you can usually get a more specific effect by redefining some of those as needed.