How do I use the trace tool

[Nasty_Harpy]

Hello everyone,

My situation is this. I have a hand drawn map I did many moons ago. It is done in pencil crayon. I have brought it into CC3 with some instruction from another member, who also mentioned I could use the trace tool to draw the land masses on my homemade map, however, I've tried this and I'm just not understanding how trace works I guess. I go to the borders option and click on it, then go to my map. I can see a little square centered in the crosshairs. I click where I want to start tracing my map, but I'm not sure what happens after press T because there doesnt' seem to be anything on my map. The instructions I've seen on line say that I have to start the line then press T but what does start the line mean?

Any help is appreciated.

Thank you.

[Mouse]

Hello Nasty Harpy

I think there may have been a small misunderstanding here. The trace tool works perfectly well. Its just that it doesn't work on imported images because they are not constructed from vector polygons.

The fastest way to do what you want to do now is to use the freehand drawing tool and just hand trace the bits you want onto a sheet above the bitmap.

If you are having any difficulties wrapping your head around the basic concepts of how things really work in CC3/CC3+, you might find it quite useful to work through the example map that comes with the package - the instructions for which are contained in the User Manual.

No one can deny that CC3 has a steep learning curve - especially if you've never used vector software before, but accessing the power of the FastCAD heart of it is easiest if you follow the User Manual example

[OUdaveguy98]

Hello.

I think you could upload your hand drawn map into illustrator and convert it to a vector, then import into CC3.

Dave

[Mouse]

That's a really good idea OUdaveguy98.

I tried the same thing by converting a bitmap to a vector drawing using CorelTrace, but I couldn't upload it into CC3. Even copying and pasting it into CC3 with both apps open at the same time didn't work. CC3 accepted the paste operation, but in doing so immediately converted it to a bitmap.

The way CTrace constructs vector polygons must be very different to the way FastCAD constructs them. But maybe it will work with Illustrator.

Would you let me know if it does?

Thanks

[Nasty_Harpy]

okay dokee, thank you both. I don't have Illustrator, but I understand what you're saying there. I may have to suck it up and try to redraw my map from scratch.

[Mouse]

Probably the fastest way to do that is by using the freehand drawing tool - the pencil button on the right.

Before you start check the attributes listed across the top of the screen. Make sure you have the right sheet and layer selected before you start drawing, and that the line width is set to 0 (zero). The whole process is a lot less complicated if you also have the correct polygon fill selected as well.

Once you have finished tracing the outline of an area you may need to join any separate segments you made by having to stop and move the view. You can do this quite easily by right clicking the fractalize button (straight line to jagged line icon on the right) and choosing Combine Paths from the dropdown list. Use this tool to join any separate segments, paying very close attention to the options that appear in the command line at the bottom of the screen as you go.

Then, when you have all the little paths you drew around an area converted into a single path, right click the fractalize button again and choose Path to Poly, to convert it into a polygon, which if you had the correct fill selected to start with should automatically fill itself with that fill. If you forgot that bit and its filled itself with something else instead, you can change it using the change properties button. There are two of these paint pot buttons on the left. The lower one is probably the easiest to figure out if you are only just getting started with CC3.

If you have any problems just let us know

EDIT: LOL! Sorry Tonnichiwa!!!

[Tonnichiwa]

Well, if you are going to re-draw the map from scratch anyway, then you should just put another layer of water over the top of it, then go into sheets and effects, and add a transparency to it at about 10%. Then trace over the top of your original map, using the default landmass, onto the new water sheet by zooming in up close so you can follow the lines easily. (This is assuming of course, that your map is of land that is surrounded by water or has an ocean or sea somewhere in it).

Zoom back out when you are done, save it, and turn off the transparency. If you like your result, you can delete your original map that you imported, and get rid of the transparency completely from the sheets and effects and you should have a great looking map in the exact form of your original map.

That is the exact method I used to make the map in the exact shape it needed to be for the Guildworld map that we did a while back. It worked perfectly.

EDIT: DOH! ninja'd by mouse!

[ChickPea]

I have no idea how CC3 works, so this may not be compatible, but you can trace images in Inkscape. There's a tutorial here. You can get Inkscape for free at inkscape.org.

Inkscape's default file format is SVG and I don't know if that can imported into CC3. You can export to other formats too, like PDF for example.