Drawing Crenelated Walls

Crenelated walls and Arrow Slits are signature items of our typical fantasy castles.  Since I wanted to be able to draw these castles in Campaign Cartographer, I needed it puzzle out how to do it.  It's not a feature that comes baked in, though there are a number of techniques and one product that can do the the job.  This article will contain my learning to date on this subject.

Drawing Strategies Identified

 I have found several approaches that I will delve a bit into within this post.  In summary, they are:

1. Using City Designer's House Tool  
2. The Chapel - Tutorial by Joachim de Ravenbel 
3. Castle Walls, Cartographer's Annual Vol 4 (2010) 
4. Manually "Cutting" crenelations

I stumbled across these four approaches via web searches and the CC3 Facebook User's group. 

Using City Designer's House Tool

Aldebert DeRolville posted a thought on Facebook in the Campaign Cartographer 3+ (private) Facebook group.  He found that he coulf create city walls, or really any wall by using the CD3 house tool.

He suggested creating a house style, applying a bitmap of a stone texture you like in the house setting and define a new flat building.  The beauty of the tool (per DeRolville) is that you can force the texture to stay aligned with the wall border.  Once the wall is drawn, you can add on top symbols for merlons with the merlons on a different sheet.  Then effects can be added to the merlon sheet to create appropriate shadow, glow, etc. The sample image he provided in included here.

I have not further investigated the idea, just including in for completion at this point.

The Chapel - Tutorial by Joachim de Ravenbel 

Joachim wrote an extensive tutorial on how to draw The Chapel a small castle/chapel with the signature features I was looking to learn how to draw.  His tutorial seems intended to be used with the annual supplement (CA46) that supports drawing castle walls, but it also includes ideas on how to accomplish these features without the supplement.

I ran across this tutorial as a part of one of my searches that took me to ProFantasy's forums where I found an article on Arrow slits in wall.

In further reading, I found at least one comment that this tutorial was written for CC3, not CC3+and as such, doesn't quite work right with today's software.  At some point, I want to try following the tutorial so that I can know for sure.  In any case, the tutorial is extensive and likely well worth the time to follow. 

Castle Walls, Cartographer's Annual

The Cartographer's Annual sometimes has very applicable extensions for CC3.   The October 2010 issue was Castle Walls by Joachim de Ravenbel. Accoding to ProFantasy's web site:

The October Annual 2010 includes a complete new set of drawing commands, programmed by CC3 community member Joachim de Ravenbel. They make creating complex wall shapes - among other things needed for authentic-looking medieval castle floorplans - a snap

The accompanying tutorial takes you through creating a complex castle layout, showing off how the different commands interact and allow you to draw beautiful layouts in a fraction of the time it needed before.

I found another post by Joachim (CA46 Arrow Slit) that provides additional explanation on the arrow slit tool which draws very precise slits complete with alcoves.  That is worth a read of using the arrow slit tool included with the annual.

I can't comment on the accuracy of the above, but it does sound very much on point for the problem I was tackling.   For now, I have not been willing to lay down the $40 required for the annual that appears to only have this set of tools for me.

 Manually "Cutting" Crenelations

 Having done my research, I had an epiphany of sorts.  I had been looking at the problem as one of adding merlons on to of a wall and somehow drawing around arrow slits in walls. Both daunting tasks.  It occurred to me that I could use the Color Key sheet effect to cut crenelations and arrow slits into objects instead of drawing the actual objects.

The key to this operation is that Color Key makes a specified color (#6 Hot Pink by default) essentially negative space.  It causes anything under the specific colored entity to disappear from the drawing. When this is combined with the Bevel effect on a sheet, the bevel treats any gaps in objects as not there, so it bevels around the gaps and makes what what seems to me to be a convincing crenelated wall effect.

The image with the hot pink triangles show the appearance after cutting triangles are added before effects are applied.  Also visible in this illustration are two crenelations in a portion of curtain wall at a lower level of the castle (and on a background sheet of the drawing.

To finish the effect, I created a liner sheet beneath the sheet containing my wall with color keys.  That sheet has adjusted effects to represent the bottom of the crenelation/slit.

I initially thought the variability in the resultant openings was a problem.  I had just drawn a shape and copied it around the drawing rotating as seemed appropriate, so some are larger than others and likely none of them are perfectly lined up with the wall.  When I got closer to finished I realized that was a plus in showing a hand built castle created without modern technology -- in other words the irregularities are features not flaws.