A simple question
I think I must be missing something fairly fundamental about the way CC works, though I've been using it now for some weeks.
Let me give a very simple example of where I'm just falling totally flat on my face.
Assume I want to draw the walls to a room which looks like the outside of a figure 8 - i.e. two interlocking circles but without any walls in the middle.
I start off drawing two interlocking circles.
Then I break each circle at its intersection with the other one (two breaks per circle).
Then I delete the two little internal arcs.
Now I've got my right shape, but it's made up of two arcs. I need to join these two arcs together.
I think I understand that to do that I must first of all convert them to paths. Well, I do, then I try to join the paths up, but I always end up with a mess - the joins just don't seem to work.
Please - I've struggled with this simple problem for 2 hours now. What am I doing wrong?
Richard
Let me give a very simple example of where I'm just falling totally flat on my face.
Assume I want to draw the walls to a room which looks like the outside of a figure 8 - i.e. two interlocking circles but without any walls in the middle.
I start off drawing two interlocking circles.
Then I break each circle at its intersection with the other one (two breaks per circle).
Then I delete the two little internal arcs.
Now I've got my right shape, but it's made up of two arcs. I need to join these two arcs together.
I think I understand that to do that I must first of all convert them to paths. Well, I do, then I try to join the paths up, but I always end up with a mess - the joins just don't seem to work.
Please - I've struggled with this simple problem for 2 hours now. What am I doing wrong?
Richard
Comments
Otherwise, if you use the combine path command in the same menu, you can press 'f' and 's' to select which endpoint of the first path connects to which endpoint of the second.
"After having selected the two paths you wish to join, the command line will read: Select Next Path/[Finish] Flip Selections (‘F’ – First, ‘S’ – Second): Use the F and S keys to flip the endpoints used for the joining."
My application is actually a bit more complex than that - lots of circles. I've attached it here.
Maybe someone could tell me how to join these arcs into one continuous line (the walls of my temple).
Cheers
Richard
Richard
You can then use one of the curved poly drawtools to Trace it at the greater line width and delete the original. I tried this approach with your example and it worked fine
If so, what I did with your map is the following:
- Use "Line to Path" on all the segments simultaneously. Since these form a closed polygon, this will also automatically join the lines into that polygon. Note that it will also be filled, but we will fix that in a moment.
- Use "Delete Node" to delete one node in each corner. This is required because we currently have 2 nodes in each corner (one from each of the two arcs that met here), and this is what is causing the weird effects. Pay attention to the figure when deleting nodes. If the corner changes shape after deleting a node, simply hit undo to reverse that deletion, and continue on to the next corner.
- Use "Change Properties" on the polygon, and change the width to the desired wall width.
If you still have misbehaving corners after doing the last step, hit undo, and use delete node on that corner again, before repeating the last step.
I followed Monsen's instructions - which was great. I can even understand the reasons! I was wondering, though, how do you get CC to show you the nodes? I seemed to be just clicking in the dark and seeing the results.
I also noticed that the drawing had imperfections when the line width was set to 10.
PDJ - I have problems with Trace. I've seen it in the tutorials, but whenever I want to use it it doesn't come up as an option. For example, if I select Smooth Poly from Monsen's map, I can click somewhere on my wall to start the thing off, but then I don't get any trace option after that to follow the walls around.
Richard
Large white letters are corridor names. The rooms are numbered. Some doors have arrows showing direction they open.
Sorry, had some broken links.
All of level 3 & All of level 4
trapazopidal room
dh3e_4
4-leaf clover
dh4d_05
quarter circle
dh4d_06
square room, rounded corners, half-circle statue rooms
dh4d_07
a mess:
dh4d_09
partial circle, square on one part
dh4d_10
I forget what this is called:
dh4e_05
dh4f_05
tops of two half-circles connected by a small opening.
dh4f_10
Yes, my players hate these rooms.
All done with Dungeon Designer, Add Room, polygon room with an orange wall of 2 feet width.
I've attached a JPG of how my temple looks in the end.
This is the finale of my adventure so having a plain square temple (which is what I did at first) was just too boring! As you can see, it's in the middle of a lake.
Final image needed a little gimp-ing, but I'm quite pleased with it. All comments gratefully received, of course.
This is going to be part of a module I'm publishing for Pathfinder, BTW, as a downloadable PDF. That's the reason I'm going to so much trouble :-)
Cheers
Richard
You only get Trace when using the drawing tools you access via the buttons at top left (those defined for walls, roads, contours and stuff). The shape-drawing tools accessed from the buttons on the right don't have trace,
I don't know why.
Congratulations on your map - I think it's neat. The bold composition makes it really striking.
Peter
Richard
If you are using smooth paths/polygons, you can use Ctrl+F to toggle frames (Then immediately issue a redraw command to actually see them). This will show the guideline for the entity. For the smooth paths/polygons, the nodes will be at this guideline, not on the actual entity.
You can also always use the LIST command on an entity to get the exact coordinates for all the nodes in the entity. From here, you can also easily see if there are two nodes at the exact same location, as you will then have two lines in a row with the same coordinates.
Richard
Nice temple btw.
You know it's funny but apart from changing the position of the sun I use the sheet effects exactly as they're provided by default. They seem to do the trick just as they are.
I say it's funny because the tutorials talk a lot about fiddling with these but I couldn't see the point.
Does anyone have any recommendations?
Richard