[Award Winner] Basic CC3 Concepts explained

[NeonKnight]

Oh...can't you FREEZE layers in CC3?

You can FREEZE (lock) and THAW (unlock) and HIDE layers.

You can only HIDE Sheets!

[ravells]

Ahhhhh gotcha!

[NeonKnight]

So, to follow up, when making a map in CC3, one may likely have the following sheets (for an overland):

BACKGROUND
COASTLINE
LAND
COUNTOURS
FOREST
RIVERS
STRUCTURES
TEXT

The top item, BACKGROUND would be the bottom sheet as it is the first sheet drawn, then the COASTLINE SHEET, etc, down the list. So, remember, the TOP sheet is Drawn first.

LAYERS in CC3 are as Valarian said, merely groupings of associated items/symbols. For example, when I am drawing city maps, I may have 3 or more different sheets for buildings (Low, Med, High) to represent the different shadow lengths they all cast, but I would have only one LAYER for those buildings called BUILDINGS.

[NeonKnight]

OK, so we be a rating. Was this info/simple tutorial about Sheets/Layers useful?

Please rate.

[JoeyD473]

Though I understood Sheets and Layers in CC3 before this I thought this was a very good tutorial. I hope you do a lot more CC3 tutorials soon

[dittotb]

Excellent explanation of each. The folks over at PF use the term layers that way because many CAD programs use layers that way.

[jreiswig]

I've used every version of CC (including the old DOS one) and this tutorial is nice. Sheets are the best thing to happen to CC in a long time.

[loydb]

I just think of it as:

sheets == layers ala' Photoshop
layers == symbol grouping for ease of mass manipulation of similar entities

[jaerdaph]

A CC3 Sheet is really like what you expect a layer to be. A CC3 Layer is more like a category. Whenever I see the word "layer" in CC3, I mentally replace it with "category".

[NeonKnight]

Well, programs like Photoshop and what not have been around only since around 1988 at the absolute earliest (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Photoshop), while the FastCAD program CC3 and it's predecessors are based off have been around since 1979 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FastCAD ). Cam[aign Cartographer came out in 1993 and uses the FASTCAD engine.

So, I believe they were sort of locked into the use of LAYERS at the time of initial development.