Icons & Commands: SVC Symbol Creation
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 the creation of SVC symbols in CC2.
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Icons & Commands (in order as they appear in the text) |
What will you need for this tutorial? 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! And last, but not least, you really should read all of these tutorials. They are written with the assumption that you have read them all, so some explanations have been left out of the more recent ones.
Some quick definitions here. SVC stands for Super Vari-color or Shade Vari-color. What does this mean? It means you can set a base color, and have up to 16 shades referenced to that color. The base color is the color selected at the time you pick the symbol. Another is an acronym I tend to use. RCDI. It means Right Click, Do It. Yes, writting it out gets a little old after a while!:) |
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Icon |
Command | Summary | |
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CIRP | Draws a circle. | |
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CHANGEL | Change layer. | |
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OUTLINEB | Makes a black outline. | |
| NA | SYMDEF | Defines a symbol. | |
| NA | SYMMGR | Opens the Symbol Manager dialog. | |
| NA | SYMINFO | Opens the Symbol Settings dialog. | |
| OK, now lets get started. I'm going to use a sample file called Circle. This started out as the file blank.FSC, and I just renamed it. If you're hard-core, you'll have opened up Circle already!
Now, the first step is to draw our symbol. You can draw any symbol, but I chose to draw a circle, with a series of circles inside of it. Set your fill style to Solid, and line width to 0. If you're like me, you like to be organized, but probably never achieve any real level of organization. I like to draw one shading of a symbol at a time, to avoid confusion. Remember, confusion is the number one cause of confused minds! I drew the outer circle first. This is done with the
Image 1. On the right hand side, you can see the button for "Add". Click on it, and add a layer called VARICOLOR+0. CC2 interprets entities on this layer to be defined as being the current color, when the symbol is inserted into the map. Once added, click on the VARICOLOR+0 layer to select it, and click OK. Now, we need to outline it. Use the command Like with the circle, we are going to change the layer of the entity we just drew. In this case, the outline. Use Time to draw another circle. Again, with Now for the fun part! Use SYMDEF to define the symbol. The use of this command is detailed in my Symbol Creation tutorial. Once it is defined, enter the SYMMGR command. You will see the Symbol Manager dialog open up. See Image 2 for how this will look. This dialog is discussed in depth in my Manipulating Symbols tutorial.
Image 2. Select your symbol, and click on Edit. You will have to draw a window to edit the symbol in. Once done, type the SYMINFO command at the bottom. This will open the Symbol Settings dialog. See Image 3 for how it looked prior to Universal Update 5.
Image 3. You want to check the "Varicolor Symbol" check box. This tells CC2 that the symbol is a Varicolor symbol. If you do not do this, your symbol will do funny things or not work at all! Click OK, then close the window you are editing in. You can do this by clicking on the X at the upper right corner of the window. CC2 will open a dialog telling you that changes to the symbol are NOT UNDOABLE. Click Yes to save your work, No to throw it away. Save the file, and use it as you would any other symbol catalog. You can download the final Circles fsc file, showing how this tutorial should look when finished here. Don't forget to stop by the Mysaniti Cartographers Guild and subscribe! You can find previews to the MCG here. |
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