Icons & Commands: Varicolor, Part One
By Matthew Lynn
Good morning, mappers! My name is Matthew Lynn, and this is yet another column written by me. This series is intended to reduce the learning curve for mapping with Campaign Cartographer 2. This particular column is going to cover the vari-color feature for CC2 symbols.
What will you need for this tutorial?
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Icons & Commands (in order as they appear in the text) |
First, Campaign Cartographer 2 from Profantasy, Inc (sorry, if you have Campaign Mapper, some of these features will require an upgrade to CC2). Then, install Universal Update 4. How do you get UU4? Register!
Now, enough of my chatter. If you did my Symbol Creation tutorial, you should have a copy of the Wizards Lab.fsc symbol catalog. If you didn't do that tutorial, go and do it! Or you can download the catalog here. OK, if you are a gung-ho mapper, you will have already opened Wizards Lab.fsc. If you haven't, do so! Once opened, open the Symbol Manager. You do remember how to open it right? If not, go back through my past articles here and you'll see how! If you are not using CC2 Pro, place any of the symbols, and use EXPLODE |
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Icon |
Command | Summary | |
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EXPLODE | Breaks symbols & multipolies into their component pieces. | |
| NA | CHGCB | Changes color 1 property to Vari Color. |
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| NA | SBACK | Sends selected entities to the back of a sheet. | |
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BACK | Sends selected entities to the back of a drawing. | |
| Why EXPLODE  ? Well, this command is used to reduce entities composed of other entities into it's component parts. Normally, Multipolies, and symbols are the only entities you will use this feature on. Done? Good. Now, type CHGCB at the command prompt. Select all the entities. RCDI. Everything you had selected just turned white! Did you do something wrong? NO! This is how CC2 show's an entity with color 1 set to 31, that is not part of a symbol. Symbols made with these entities will have parts that change color based on the currently selected color. Only one color per symbol may be used, if a symbol is a "varicolor" symbol. Neat, huh? The changed entities also lose the Color 2 property. To outline them, use OUTLINEB Symbols made with these entities are called "vari-color." They used to be called "color 31" symbols. Profantasy still denotes symbols with varicolor properties with a "31" after the name. MCG catalog's follow this convention for varicolor symbols only. For super-varicolor symbols, MCG catalog's have "SVC" in the name, while Profantasy catalog's continue to use "31" in the name. Right about now, you should be asking yourself, "What the dicken's is Super-varicolor?" Well, super varicolor symbols appear to have more than one varicolor entity. In fact, they do adhere to the 1 varicolor per symbol maximum. So how does CC2 do this? It's simple really. It's done with layers. The colors that can change are based on variations from the current color. The entities that are to be affected are moved to specially identified layers. These layers are identified as "VARICOLOR+X" or "VARICOLOR-X", where X = a number. X is the offset from the currently selected color, and is used by CC2 to determine the colors of all entities on the special VARICOLOR layers. However, there is a limit. Only colors on the same row on the color picking dialog may be chosen in this fashion. If the current color would result in a shade that is not on the same row as the current color, either a black or a white entity is displayed. So there is a practical limit to your use of Super VariColor. And this feature is only available in CC2 Pro, using patches UU3(?) or UU4. Or the most recent update beyond these. Hope this helps you understand the difference between varicolor and super varicolor symbols! Some examples of these symbols can be found in the Mysaniti Cartographers Guild Previews page. Until next time! :) |
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. If they are going to be part of a symbol, make a solid fill copy of the outline, and use SBACK or BACK 