Creating and Importing PNGs and Bitmaps as Fill Styles

Preparing Art for Import

Adding Fill Styles to a drawing

When you import fill styles, those fill styles become available only in the current drawing. If you want to add them to all new drawings, you should add them to a template. Any new drawings based on that template will have the styles built in.

Creating Fill Styles from existing raster images

  1. Click the ... button to choose the folder in which your tiles are kept. This should be in a subfolder of the CC3 Bitmaps\Tiles\User folder.

  2. If your tiles contain any pixels which aren't solid, pick Alpha Transparency. Pick Opaque if they are all solid (it's quicker) - all bitmaps (bmps) are solid. The other options are used for gif files which have been converted and have a transparent color.

  3. If you would like your fill styles to be a fixed scale (real world distance) select Scaled. For floorplans, this value should be the width of a tile in drawing units. For consistency, each tile should be the same number of pixels/unit, and this value should be set in Display Speed Settings, Fill Style Resolution.
    For 1000x800 overland maps, we use a fill style scale of 50 based on 500 x 500 pixel tiles. This gives us an effective resolution on a standard page of about 800dpi. You should scale this value up or down according to the template size.

  4. The Fill style is named the same as the file name, with a suffix you type here. We recommend you use " Bitmap", that is a space then Bitmap. A file called Water.png would end up as a file called Water Bitmap if you follow this rule.

  5. Select Remove Resolutions. This means that if you are using multiple resolution files for each tile, the suffixes are not included in the fill style name.

  6. Deselect Outlined.

  7. Save the template or drawing.

  8. To make use of the fill styles, you should define some draw tools which use them as a fill style, or select the Fill Style Indicator, set the fill style and use a draw button.