The drawing tool for the railroads in that annual draws 2 lines on 2 separate sheets. There is a 12 unit wide line of black drawn by the main part of the drawing tool on a sheet called RAILWAY BACKGROUND*, and an 8 unit wide line of white on top of it on a sheet called RAILWAY*, which is added using the Extra entity of the Outline properties of the tool.

Drawing tool:

Outline - Extra entity:

If you create a new drawing tool with the same properties and outline as this, and create the two sheets you will need for the railway, you should be on the right track :)

EDIT: Oh sorry - I forgot to say that you would need to alter the line style in the Outline Extra entity settings to be some kind of a dashed line rather than a solid one. This would work well for the black and white version of the tool, but for the red and white version with the black outline you would need to do something slightly differently. In that case the main drawing tool would have to draw both red and white lines the same width and you would need a sheet effect on the sheet with the solid line of the two to give it an Outer Glow of black. I recommend Outer Glow in this instance because you can adjust the settings on that effect to mimic an actual black line down each side.

This looks like an issue with the Maximum Pixels Per Pass.

If the image resolution is quite large the rendering engine makes more than one pass to render the whole image. There is a percentage overlap but this may not always be enough to capture the source of a light that lies just outside the edge of the current pass. That means the pass may be calculated much darker than it should be.

Type EXPORTSETMPPP and hit the Enter key. In the command line you will probably see the number 4 million. Type 40 million (without any commas) and hit Enter again. Then try to export your map again.

Using sheets is probably the best way if you are quite happy to draw the shaded extent as a polygon shape.

The global sun only affects:

• how CD3 buildings are shaded, and
• which direction the shadows fall from objects on sheets with Wall Shadow, Direction sheet effects.

It doesn't affect the artificial shading you add using a sheet with black polygons on it. That sheet might have a Blur effect, and then a Blend Mode effect that is set to multiply. Transparency is controlled from within the Blend Mode.

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An alternative that isn't quite so flexible is to use a Bevel Lighted on a sheet on which you then draw polygons of texture or one of the semi-transparent fills. If you adjust the bevel to a huge width and use masses of smoothing you can get recognizable hills. However, the width of the shading won't vary.

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.

Try hitting the TAB key while you are moving/rotating/copying the objects. It toggles their visibility on and off.