Mountain Density
I've just begun making an island map, and was putting some mountains in it when I started wondering about the density of the mountains. I've attached the file for reference, but the question I have is this. I created a mountain terrain area, then plopped about a billion mountains into it spacing them with enough overlap to completely cover the mountain terrain area. The question I have is whether to even bother with the mountain terrian bit if I'm putting down that many plopables, or if I should do the terrain with fewer plopables, I just don't really know what works best.
As you may have guessed, I'm still very new to this, and while I understand the controls, I'm not sure of the aesthetic, so I'd appreciate any helpful feedback.
Thanks
As you may have guessed, I'm still very new to this, and while I understand the controls, I'm not sure of the aesthetic, so I'd appreciate any helpful feedback.
Thanks
Comments
I then pick a bitmap that is suitable to for tying the mountains to the foot hills so they look like they belong together.
The bitmap that I use depends heavily on the terrain that the mountain range is in as well as the color of the mountains and hills.
Some times it is a mountain fill bitmap if it is an area of mountains together with no foothills, sometimes is the hill fill bitmap if it match's the hills I am using , and for most, it is a color that ties the hills and mountains together.
I will make some step by step examples to show you how I build mine.
Here we have winter terrain with grey mountains.
For the color option, I find that it works best if you bring the foothills in close.
Send To Back & Deselect will help greatly in accomplishing this.
It takes longer, but has great results.
Since this is winter terrain, I have chosen white foothills.
If you look carefully, you can see gaps between the mountains and the hills.
You now pick a transitional color between the mountain range and the hills.
Click on Poly Smooth and run it around the foothills making sure that you are running along the ridgeline and were the foothills touch one another.
When you have gone all the way around and finished refresh.
You can see how the fill helps to bring the two elements together.
You get different looks depending on how you scale it.
It all comes down to what you like.
As you can see, you do not have to place them in as close as when you do for color fills.
This make the process a lot faster and gives you a little more options for creativity.
I used a mountain fill as opposed to a background fill and scaled to my particular tastes.
I always choose my fill type, scale, and use Polly Smooth for my fills instead of the generic fill tool.
It seems to work out a lot better.
They were done really quick, so they will look a lot better when time is put into them.
I hope that this helps to give you some more ideas on building mountain ranges.
:-)
Closer in maps, say, under 500 miles across, I put in lots of symbols.
There are all kinds of ways to do this, it really does come down to style and available tools.
As you collect annuals, you will have more options in both symbols and bitmaps.
I have used symbols & bitmaps from different sets within the base style that I chose for my current project.
As an example, I grabbed bitmaps & symbols from Dungeon Designer for building Helgrind because I needed lava, ash covered valley floor, and lava-rock cliffs along the coast.
I then used the skeleton symbols to place around the "Lake of the Dead".
Keep playing around with it and you will develop your own unique style.
That is what makes this such a wonderful product.
:-)
I do have another semi-related question though. How do you handle creating entire worlds? I see with FT3 you can create the world and it will work its way down to increasingly small and detailed maps, but what if you want to go the other way? For instance, I create a region for my players and when they've done it all and are ready to move out, create a larger area, maybe continent, which accurately includes the smaller region they already know. And up and up until there's suddenly an entire world.
I found it much harder to start small and go up in scale. Which is why I removed old maps, and started big and slowly going smaller and smaller.
Your experience may differ.
I am now working on 4th version of my game world, but the first Profantasy version.
Since I have a good idea of the whole world, I started in the top left corner of my world map and started building regions.
I found out that their are certain limitations on how big and detailed you can go based on the number of nodes in your map and the number of symbols you are using.
I had to find a work around.
Now that the challenge has been addressed, I can now get back to working on the world.
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Since you are starting from scratch,
I would suggest making a very general world map and then make serparte regional maps as you need them.
You can slowly build the detailed parts of your world as you need to.
The general world map is there jus to to give you guide so to speak.
Just an idea.
:-)
1) It doesn't seem to allow me to create the world I want on my own, or at least edit it to my liking. From the vid, it looks like I creates a world, or I can have it choose the next and next till I find one that I like, but does not seem to have a way for me to say I like 90% of it and will manually adjust the last 10%. Is that accurate?
2) I hate the coloring (at least the ones from the vid I saw) which were all altitude based, and had white oceans that became white oceans in CC3 regional and smaller maps. It is relatively easy to change that into something that I like better?
Thanks,
2) You can create your own coloring schemes in FT3, and you can also use image files as climate fills. The latter won't transfer to an exported CC3 map however.
1) create a world with lage areas in FT3
2) save as png
3) import the png file into Irfanview, etc. and just copy a part of a land mass. Copy and paste nto another copy of Irfanview and save.
4) import that second png into CC3 at a smaller scale.
Say the original map was 1000x800, import it in as 100x80.
5) add symbols, and text. Now you have an island.
I used this method to create a number of the islands on Crestar.
I am glad that it has inspired you - I am looking forward to seeing your future endeavors.
:-)