Hi Everyone! :D

In this week's Live Mapping session Ralf will be talking about the often neglected map border, its function in CC3+ and how to make it look good

Come along and join in, or watch later if you can't see it live :)

More or less at a world scale, but probably not if you zoom in to the map. That's because the noise used to roughen the surface prior to the erosion will be different each time. So the difference is in the fine details.

FT3, while capable of working to very high resolutions, can't match the level of detail you might achieve in a regional area in Wilbur, but you can help by setting FT3 to maximum editing resolution before you burn the imported data into the surface.

Well, I had a go with combining what I did with the original tiled house. It's not great - mainly because the map files are quite different and the combination was a crude mask that erased some of the snowy version and its map file to reveal the original house underneath it. The map file for the tiled version is very steep. The map file for the snowy version is very shallow - so that the snow doesn't bleach out to being completely white all over. There are a few strange patches you can see on the darker parts of the roof to the south where the resulted blended map file is neither one thing or another.

Let me know what you think.

@JulianDracos - I live in an area with plenty of thatched buildings, and since thatch is one of the greenest roofing materials available that isn't likely to change very much. It is also about 10 times more insulating than tiles unless you have excellent insulation in the attic space of a tiled house. So the snow does tend to stick and stay much better on thatched cottages than it does on tiled houses. It's therefore not inconceivable that you would get some wind erosion of the snow on tiled rooftops and/or melt off. The tiles are warmer because they don't keep the heat in as well as thatch does.

The other question I have is: does the snow melt into tidy sharp-edged patches, or is there a blend like I've created above where the snow shades out gradually into a melted patch?

Well, having settled on a design for the thatched cottages, I now have to decide how to do the tiled cottages.

Where the thatched cottages had a handy herringbone decoration I could use to add interest to the buildings, the tiled ones have nothing other than the tiles. I've already tried using something from the tile texture and it just looked a mess, so I'm wondering now if the lumpy snow look will be enough. The part building at the top of this shot is one of the thatched buildings, while the one at the bottom is a prototype tiled house. It's a bit scruffy around the edges and the chimney hasn't been cut out of the map file so it's too bright, but I do those things when I've finished the design.

The question here is one of the required amount of detail. Does it have enough to make it interesting?

Hide all but the BACKGROUND sheet and try zoom to extents again.

That should bring you back to large enough to see the map.

Then show each sheet in turn and hit Zoom to extents until you find out which sheet has the entity that is causing the app to zoom that far out. The chances are that you have a node or a symbol way off in the distance (more likely to be a node). Once you identify the sheet it's on you should have a chance to work out what it is.

If none of that helps, shout again.