@EukalyptusNow Please can you send a report of this phenomenon to Tech Support? You are not the first person this has happened to. I just failed to recognise it for what it was as the appearance can be quite different from one building type to another. The main problem is that the MERGE layer is active. We can't pinpoint when this happens exactly, since it must be changing to MERGE automatically at some point. There is no reason for any user to deliberately change to the MERGE layer - so it must be CC3.

It would be most useful if you could remember the things you did just before it all went wrong - anything from opening a different catalogue to using the pick properties tool. We can then try to pin it down and sort it out.

I just had a quick play with the map and discovered there are bits of the affected building on the MERGE layer. I don't think that should happen.

The MERGE layer is also the active layer in the map for some reason. Try switching to the BLDNG (HOUSE 1) layer, using a colour that isn't an intense reddish colour, and adding a new house. You also seem to have the COMMON sheet active. Try making the BUILDINGS sheet active instead.

This happens sometimes when the nodes are too close together. You will need to explode the landmass just once, and then type the command SIMPLIFY on your keyboard and hit enter. If you leave the value at zero it will remove any node that is right on top of another node. If you give it a small value it will remove nodes that are closer together than that value.

Do this to all the little lakes as well.

Now you can either use the multipoly tool to remake the single mass with holes in it for lakes, or you can add a Color Key sheet effect to the LAND sheet and then change the colour of all the lakes to match the Color Key (usually magenta, or colour number 6). This will cause the lakes to cut virtual holes in the land polygon (providing they are in front of it).

The advantage of keeping the lakes separate and having just an ordinary polygon as the main land mass is that you can trace the coastline with any fills you want to take to the edge of it. A multipoly can't be edited or traced.

Nice map :)

I'm not familiar with either Cosmographer or with using SS3, but if you can switch the lighter grey floor for the darker grey floor that will make the club look darker than outside for a start. Then if you want to go even darker use a Hue/Saturation Lightness sheet effect on the floor.

Right click the hourglass and pick Global Sun from the menu. The two settings that affect the way lighting works are in the Activate lighting panel. You can adjust the blur on the shadows cast by your lights, and how intense the shadows themselves are.

In the 'Wall shadow, Point Light Finalize' sheet effect there is also an option to make the shadows a colour other than black, called 'Shadow Color is ambient light' Have a play with that as well. You will need to change the colour in the Shadow Color panel to see any difference. The default is black.