(6 symbol connectivity test using the "bright" version of Title A style)

I did one like this with a small blur and a transparency effect on the GRID sheet.

It's a 5ft grid with black dashed lines of 0.1 line thickness.

Having a line thickness greater than zero is important in this one case, since for some reason a zero width line doesn't behave as expected.

Hi everyone! :D

Due to popular demand, in this week's Live Mapping session Ralf will be continuing the New City Style series - completing the example town and castle he started in part 3 of the series.

Come and join in the discussion here on YouTube:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yFAao-FUZnM

Or you can watch it here if you wish.

All the previous live mapping sessions in this series (and hundreds of others as well) can be found here:

I think this is all of them so far. I say 'so far', but I can only add more snakes if I get to the end of the wish list and still have some time left.

That is most usually caused by the lights not being present in the current render pass, and not accounted for in the total light falling in the current render pass. At a guess that image took 2 passes to render.

Type EXPORTSETMPPP and hit enter.

The number showing in your command line will most likely be 4000000 (4 million)

Type 40000000 (40 million) and hit enter.

That will expand the size of each pass over the map as it is rendered, and hopefully prevent the artefact by completing the whole map in a single pass.

What a huge body of work to leave behind! Besides being a lovely, gentle man he will probably be one of the most prolific fantasy mappers in history.

That's a really good map elezriata - and "Hi" from Sue Daniel ;)

Have you heard about the Vintyri Collections? These are huge collections of free third party art assets that might help with things like more variation of rugs and furniture.

The links for all the assets can be found here:

Where the Vintyri collections in particular are concerned please read the installation instructions really carefully.

Hi Mika :)

There is no right or wrong way to do a thing in CC3. Only variations on a theme.

For my suggestion I have started with a standard DD3 template for this map (using one of the dirt bitmaps as the background), and prepared it by adding 10 new sheets. 9 of those sheets are STEP sheets, and one is a SCREEN sheet. This last sheet is designed to hide things that fall outside the area of the map. Some styles have it, but some don't. My copy of the DD3 template doesn't.

I didn't use the FLOORS sheet at all, but drew the mass of the rock directly onto the FLOORS MASK sheet using the freehand drawing tool. I modified the sheet effects to make the edge more prominent by adding a Bevel, Lighted, and strengthening the glow that was already there.

Each of the 9 steps is a simple white polygon drawn with the freehand drawing tool, such that it covers the entire extent of the level it represents and extends under the edge of the FLOORS MASK. Here is one of the step shapes with effects adjusted to show it's extent.

The freehand drawing tool doesn't create a polygon all by itself. You have to draw the outline a bit like you would on a piece of paper with a pencil, and then use Path to polygon from the right click menu of the Fractalize tool to convert it.

As you can see from the screen shot above, I have used 2 different techniques on the 2 sets of steps. Rather than carry on describing these effects and adding loads more to this description, I have attached the FCW file below, so that you can see how the Blend modes are set up. There is one important trick that is very useful to know, however, and that is if you set a Blend mode to 'Multiply' all the white is taken out of the fill. If the fill is solid white (as it is with these steps), then all you are left with is the line and the shadow showing on the top set.

I used Multiply as the Blend Mode on that top set of steps because the highlight effect on the other steps became extra concentrated where the edges were closer together.

Here is the FCW file for you to have a look at. If there is anything you don't understand just shout. Or you may decide to do it a different way.

I've roughed out the rest of the map and added a new title from Jerry. There have been a few name changes. I'm still working on the rivers - tapering them and tidying the ends.

@GThiel - Jerry, please let me know if I have forgotten anything, or if you want anything changed from the way I've done it? Thanks :)

Ok. Taking a random example...

If I have created a map in DD3, and I want to use SS4 (Dungeons of Schley) in it, I would get the drawing tools as described above, and then I would open a second instance of CC3 by right clicking the desk icon and picking CC3, or New, or whatever your system provides for a new instance of an app, and then I would use that instance to create a new SS4 map. I would then save that temporary map with nothing drawn in it as "TEMP SS4" and Pick that as the file to Insert into the DD3 file I was actually working on. I would insert it, but then immediately delete or undo the action because I don't want the dummy SS4 map or any part of it. I just want to fool CC3 into importing all the relevant fills for SS4. It doesn't matter that the dummy map is instantly deleted. The fills are imported in that instant and they stay, even though the SS4 map is gone as fast as it arrived.

Once that is done all the SS4 drawing tools will work as if this was an SS4 map.