This question may be a little strange...

LadieStorm · June 2016

Okay, this might be one for the books.

Let's say I am mapping a building/structure that has multiple levels, and I want to copy the outlaying structure to all of my levels...will the copy to clipboard copy EVERYTHING? What I mean is...what if I decide to make my own sheets? Will it copy my sheets as well? Or do I have to do that manually?

Also, what if I want to make the 'landscape' smaller to account for elevation, but want to keep the structure the same size? Is that even possible? Or am I trying to do too much?

Loopysue · June 2016

If you choose copy you will be asked to select the items you wish to copy. You can then either select them individually, or click in a space to get the crosshairs and select everything in a rectangle. Once you choose "do it" you will be asked for an origin. This is merely the point at which you want the copied items to appear on your cursor when you are pasting. For example if you click in the middle of the collection, the collection will appear with its middle point stuck to the end of the cursor when you paste it. To make precise alignment easier you can type 0,0 and press enter when you are asked for the origin, then when you paste it type 0,0 again, so that the pasted item ends up in exactly the same spot on the new map.

If the sheets don't already exist in the new file they will be created (that's what I've found when copying between CC3+ files anyway), but its not too difficult to move things between sheets if they end up in the wrong place.

I'm not sure I'm understanding what you mean in the last part of your question, but once you have pasted things down they don't behave any differently to any other object on the drawing. In other words its quite easy to select a tree that was one of many pasted at the same time and make it smaller or larger than the others... was that what you meant?

Loopysue · June 2016

I'm not sure if any effects you might have put on your sheets will be copied along with the sheets. I haven't tried that.

LadieStorm · June 2016

Let me see if I can explain my last question better...let's say I have a duck pond in the yard on the side if a three story inn. Now let's.say there are a couple of trees next.to that pond. Well, on the ground floor, if one was to look out a window, they would see the duck pond and the trees at their actual size.

But, let's say someone on the second floor is standing on a second floor balcony, watching the ducks swim on the pond. To someone higher up looking down, that pond and those trees are going to appear smaller, because the observer is farther away

Is this possible?

Loopysue · June 2016

That's perspective your talking about, and when trying to fake perspective on a 2D plane (your screen) things have a tendency to get a bit complicated, because when you make stuff smaller the other stuff around it gets larger - the area of grass is larger because there isn't so much tree and pond covering it any more, so you don't really get the effect.

I've seen just recently a really nice way of showing greater distance (although I can't for the life of me remember which post it was). There was a three story building with trees around the outside of it, and with each elevation the trees stayed the same size but got gradually more fuzzy. Lighting effects were also more blurred than they were when viewed from the ground floor aspect.

Does that help?

Loopysue · June 2016

I could probably do a better job of explaining the problem with reducing the size of stuff a bit better by saying imagine your pond was a moat. If you were to reduce the moat in size with each level you would pretty soon end up with a flooded inn, and ducks in the kitchen sink. The only thing you would be able to do then to avoid drowning in the great flood, would be to reduce your floorplan, but I think that would kind of defeat the point of shrinking the moat in the first place

Loopysue · June 2016

That's it! That's it - I've found it!

The Curse of Strahd maps by MarMorStein. The most recent post shows 3-4 levels of the tower, showing the tree getting progressively more fuzzy with increased height. Also the lights on the barrow are dimmed away.

Sorry - haven't worked out how to link between threads just yet.

LadieStorm · June 2016

No... You are actually making perfect sense to me. I wonder if you can do that blurring symbol effect with cc3+? I believe he uses Photoshop...

Loopysue · June 2016

The kind of blurring you or I would use on a fill doesn't really work with symbols in CC3+. They stay stubbornly in focus... unless... you use another sheet immediately above the symbols and set it up with a blend mode and blur, so that you are looking through the shapes you draw on it. The best fill to use I find is Solid White 10, although I haven't really used it very much, and there may be a downside I haven't yet discovered.

Its easier to show than tell, so I have attached the file to this comment for you, along with the screen shot.

EDIT: I realise now that I left the blur on the symbol sheet by mistake, but at least you can see that all it does is smudge the colour of the symbols, rather than properly blur them

If you draw a Solid White 10 rectangle on the blur sheet that covers the grass, the pond, the trees and the ducks, and use only a slight blur (you don't want to go over the top with it or it makes the eyes feel funny), you can put everything on your new floor on top of that, so it remains in focus. You could also slightly increase the blur with each level, but I wouldn't recommend a total blur of more than 10 at the highest level. (the attached file is set at 20, which makes my eyes want to jiggle and dart away from the out of focus area! lol)

LadieStorm · June 2016

Oh, I understand that completely... But you are giving me some really interesting ideas for my next.project...since all.I left.to do on my tavern is to make the sign.

I'm already thinking ahead.to my next project...which is also going to be a multi layered structure...but it's going to be something a little different;D... And the questions I'm asking are directly related to that project. I'm sort of stepping out of my comfort zone. Stepping out? More like jumping out head first!!! Lol

Loopysue · June 2016

Your welcome, LadieStorm. Just bear in mind I threw this together, and that its not a tried and tested method. I have no idea if there will be any unexpected side effects if you should need to combine these with other effects on the same sheet, for example. Let me know if you have any problems with it and I'll see if I can think a way around it for you

Loopysue · July 2016

As I suspected - having thrown it together, there was a drawback, in that if you use 2 or 3 of these blur sheets to make the grass more blurred than the tree tops, and the tree tops more blurred than things that stand even taller as you go further and further up in floor level, the accumulated effect is one of a gradual whitening of the image.

Unless you want this to be the case, which taken to the extreme would result in the ground fading to white if you had hundreds of floors to map, you can reduce the effect by reducing the opacity of the soft light blend mode to just 1%, which has no effect on the blur itself, but prevents the trace whiteness of the Solid White 10 from affecting the colour of the background when a number of blur sheets are used in the same map.

I have amended the example file I uploaded last time, though it is still called Fred :-)

LadieStorm · July 2016

No...I don't need to do anything that drastic.... what I want to do, is slightly blur my moat, and the crocodiles in it, to show distance...maybe the outer wall, that sort of thing. Give everything out side the second floor a slight blur to mimic the elevation. It will also make what's inside pop a little more.

Loopysue · July 2016

Hmmmn.... Oooo...k

I can't see any quick way of showing you what I mean, other than to give you a screen shot of what I'm currently working on.

I was a late-comer to the Vintyri Beta test group, and the main reason I was asked to help was purely to see if the new toolbars would work just as well with CC3+, on a machine that doesn't have anything else - no DD3, no CD3, no... nothing... (I must be the only person who only has CC3/+)

So. What you see here is part of a dungeon style drawing of Merelan Observatory... done in CC3+, using a whole bundle of Bogie fills and CSUAC symbols, but the main reason for showing it right now is because its the best example I have of the distance blur method I was describing above.

I hope that you can see the grass is more blurred than the trees, and the trees more blurred than the building. This is level 2. I have left the sheet effects open to show you where the two critical sheets for this effect (namely DISTANCE BLUR LEVEL 1, and 2 respectively, are located. There is nothing on either of these sheets except a rectangle of Solid White 10 that covers the entire map. I will upload a series of screen shots to follow this one that show the settings of those two effects.

I am sorry I can't upload a sample file right now, but that is because the only realistic examples I have took days to create (I have been working without drawing tools for things like walls and so on because this is CC3, and not DD3 - I hasten to add that the glitch is with one of the CC3 templates, not the new toolbars that Vintyri has been working on for us all), and all anyone else will see, in any case, is a mass of red and white crosses across the page, even if I did upload it. I couldn't even send it to you via email, because I have my CSUAC symbols installed in a different place to yours, and you would lose maybe 10% of the symbols anyway. An experiment I did with Vintyri (Mark), sending him just such a file proved this to be the case.

Loopysue · July 2016

The Effects on both distance blur sheets are the same:

The first image is of the blend mode settings, the second of the blur setttings.

The third is a screen shot of the bottom edge of the Ground Floor, showing a slightly different effect (intended to darken the image into a chasm by degrees) that makes use of a series of 4 blur sheets, each with a rectangle of Solid 10 that covers the entire plan (Solid 10 is the darker transparency sheet - not the White version). This effect is only possible by overlaying the blur sheets on top of one another, such that the cliff becomes gradually more blurred towards the bottom of the picture.

Shessar - Queen of the precipice and stream... Thank you so much for sharing your cliffs with us all - as you can probably see where I got the idea for their construction, quite apart from any glitzy effect I might have added ;-)

Vintyri · July 2016

This is a very good mini-tutorial that I think may prove useful to more people than LadieStorm. The screen shots also show a piece of your map behind the dialog boxes, which make a teaser out of it making us wonder what this fascinating map content is. So ... why don't you be nice to us and show us the rest of what's back there?

If you don't want to interrupt LadieStorm's thread with your map, just go ahead and start a new thread. But do it, please!

Loopysue · July 2016

Posted By: VintyriIf you don't want to interrupt LadieStorm's thread with your map, just go ahead and start a new thread. But do it, please!

All right then, I will. I will call it "Merelan Observatory"... but first I have some rendering to do ;-)

LadieStorm · July 2016

Okay....yes, that actually makes a lot of sense. I didn't think about the blend mode. That would probably help with my sub floors too! I'm trying something different, and if I manage to pull it off....well, let's just say, it will be interesting!

Loopysue · July 2016

That's good. Just remember:

The darken effect doesn't make use of the blend mode at all. It only has a blur effect, and the transparencies for this method are Solid 10, not the white variety.

The blend mode is used in the elevations to reduce the darkening that occurs when you blur colours together and loose all the bright pinpricks of light.

Also remember that not everyone likes things blurred. I'm going to be reducing my blur to .5 instead of 1 on the Observatory. You will have to judge for yourself just how much is too much

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This question may be a little strange...

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