[Award Winner] Basic CC3 Concepts explained

[jaerdaph]

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

Yeah - sheets were a later addition to FastCAD, and Profantasy initially took advantage of them specifically for starship deck plans in Cosmographer, where each sheet would be a different deck, all within the same drawing. Now that sheets are used for effects in CC3, Cosmographer will most likely require you to do different decks in their own FCW drawing file. Not a bad tradeoff, though.

[goatdealer]

Fantastic explaination of sheets and layers. Very clear, I learned a lot from the tutorial and it inspired me to learnt how to rep
Keep up the good work.

[teef]

forgive me for being a bit thick but i'm still trying to get this straight.

1) would it be correct to say that you'd use a Sheet for, say, 'Waterways' and individual Layers for, say, 'Navigable Rivers', 'Non-navigable Rivers', 'Important Streams' and 'Canals'?

2) or a Sheet for 'Settlements' and individual Layers for 'Cities', 'Towns', 'Villages', and 'Encampments'?

3) but all Layers are visible on any Sheet, right? so 'Canals' could be visible on any other Sheet too, like a Coastline Sheet for instance?

4) so in other words any Layer can be visible on any Sheet, but the Sheet you choose to display a given Layer on would normally be one that ... what. logically gathers a number of related Layers together?

if i've got this messed up please feel free to correct me.

[NeonKnight]

forgive me for being a bit thick but i'm still trying to get this straight.

1) would it be correct to say that you'd use a Sheet for, say, 'Waterways' and individual Layers for, say, 'Navigable Rivers', 'Non-navigable Rivers', 'Important Streams' and 'Canals'?

Correct

2) or a Sheet for 'Settlements' and individual Layers for 'Cities', 'Towns', 'Villages', and 'Encampments'?

Correct again

[Quote]3) but all Layers are visible on any Sheet, right? so 'Canals' could be visible on any other Sheet too, like a Coastline Sheet for instance?[Quote]

Yes and No. see below.

4) so in other words any Layer can be visible on any Sheet, but the Sheet you choose to display a given Layer on would normally be one that ... what. logically gathers a number of related Layers together?

if i've got this messed up please feel free to correct me.

No prob, it is a little difficult of a concept to wrap one's head around.

Let try this.

Image you are drawing a map, and you have decided to use many sheets of transparencies. These are in Campaign Cartographer: SHEETS

You place down your first SHEET, and color the entire SHEET, BLUE. You call this sheet OCEAN.

You then lay down on top of that SHEET another piece of Transparency. Because it is transparent, you see the entire BLUE OCEAN SHEET underneath.

on this SHEET you colour in large light green blobs and call this LAND

You then place another sheet on top, and color in some GREY MOUNTAINS, then another sheet with DARK GREEN FORESTS, and a final sheet with again BLUE RIVERS.

Now for simplicity we used the same BLUE PEN to color the rivers.

Now we want to make copies of this many sheet map for our friends. We collect the SHEETS and place them in a photocopier. The copier will copy what we have. BUT, we can select certain colors to omit, and we decide to omit the color BLUE when we press the copy button. The next image that comes out will not have Blue Oceans or Blue rivers. This is because they are the Blue 'Layer'.

Now that was little simple, but lets imagine now that we wanted to label that map. We could label the oceans on the ocean sheet, and the mountains on the mountain sheet, etc, but if we did that, any effects we apply to the individual sheet gets applied to all entities on that sheet, regardless of what layer (color) they are.

Suffice to say, in CC3, you can draw an entire map using only ONE layer (Say a BLACK PEN), Just like you could draw the entire map on only One Sheet. But CC3 really shines when you have like you said above, a single Sheet for features (Settlements with a CITY Layer, a TOWN layer and a Village Layer). You hide the settlement sheet, and everything is not shown, or you could only show cities and towns but not villages but hiding layers.

[teef]

thanks for the reply, good to know that i've got part of this straight. and i do think the transparencies concept is a great approach to this.

i confess that i haven't got the Blue Pen/Black Pen thing clear in my head but that's okay. i think it might be time to sally forth with CC3 and do a little learn-by-doing.

[Midgardsormr]

The pen analogy was maybe a bit too abstract.

Sheets are a functional construct. They determine the order in which things are drawn on the screen and which object are affected by which effects.

Layers are an organizational construct. They can be used to place related objects into groups, regardless of which sheet they are on.

You might have a "buildings" sheet and a "building shadows" sheet and a "building roofs" sheet, each with different effects, but all of the houses, house shadows, and house roofs in one layer called "houses" while the shops, shop shadows, and shop roofs are in another layer called "shops."

Functionally, all the buildings will behave the same way no matter what kind of building they are. Making a new sheet for each different kind of building wastes both system resources and time. Putting different kinds of buildings in different layers, though, enables you to hide all of the houses or all of the shops, while the rest of the objects on those same sheets (but different layers) remain visible.

[teef]

ah, that sheds a bit of light! i like the organizational construct VS functional construct idea, the first time i can remember seeing the two differentiated in this way. thank you.

[NeonKnight]

Thanx Midgardsormr.

Sometimes when I try and simplify an explanaition, I simplify too mach and make it worse.

[Papitun]

Sometimes when I try and simplify an explanaition, I simplify too mach and make it worse.

Not at all. I wouldn't have been able to understand Midgardsormr's explanation properly if it wasn't for your in depth analysis.

I now understand sheets and layers! Many thanks to all.

[bloodymage]

I'm trying to wrap my head around this software since I purchased it years ago. It's giving me fits, but I'm a stubborn old goat and I'm tryin' like crazy to learn, but it's a difficult go for a fellow in my condition.