Help with Lighting effects

Hello,

Well, I'm making some progress with CC3, and threw together a quick outdoor battlemap for a D&D 4e campaign I'll be hopefully starting next week. It's fairly simple stuff: an open field outside a village near a well.

However, it's meant to be a battle at night. The heroes rush to the rescue of a priestess standing outside, a shining beacon of radiant light in the darkness that unfortunately is drawing the attention of the local undead. A chance, I thought, to try out those nifty lighting effect that came with the annual.

After spending a lot of time staring at a totally black screen, or at some very dodgy shadows, I finally figured out that the global sun settings are key. But I can't quite make sense of them. As it currently stands, the map's a bit dark, with circles around the light sources, but nothing is casting any shadows.

How do I:
Set the global sun settings properly?
Get the symbols (trees, rocks, well) to cast proper shadows (I've inserted the Point Light shadow effect on the relevant sheets)?

Any help appreciated! Feels quite good to finaly produce a map I can use for an encounter!

-Mike

Comments

  • With the lighting effect turned on--before I started messing around with the global sun settings, which seemed to have washed everything out, this is what I got. (I did like that the darkness helped hide the blotchy ground--I need to work on blending that in better.)
  • jslaytonjslayton Moderator, ProFantasy Mapmaker
    The odd appearance of the PNG symbols (a clear halo around them) is caused by an interaction between the image and the alpha mask used to determine parts of the symbol are visible. If a pixel is even slightly opaque (as with the halos around the trees) then the lighting filter will view that pixel as completely opaque and let it block light. This behavior results in the odd halos around the trees and other PNG symbols because the PNG symbols have areas of not-quite-opaque pixels around them to get soft edges.
Sign In or Register to comment.