WIP: region of Lilia
OwlishlyTaboo
Traveler
Hello everyone :)
Am writing this post to show some WIP and to ask for some advice to the more experienced map makers.
I would like to make some kind of magical "glow" / aura sheet to lay on top of the middle area of the map (the one with the elven town, holy grove and huge forest all around it) in order to kind of separate it from the rest of the map. I tried experimenting with different polygons of shades of purple with outer glows and messing with a transparency sheet but could not get the results I quite wanted.
Have any of you tried anything similar before? Would you have any advice on how to do that?
Also general advice for the map is more than welcome!
Thank you for your time,
Sam :)
Comments
That looks like an interesting map :)
There are lots of different ways of doing a glow, so I will tell you mine, and others will probably tell you theirs. Which you use is up to you.
I would draw the purple polygons with a smooth poly on their own sheet, and on that sheet I would add a reasonably large blur to soften the edge, and then a Blend Mode set to Screen.
If you are interested in creating a heatmap Jason Payne wrote a good article on that not so long ago right here: https://rpgmaps.profantasy.com/overland-heatmaps-with-cc3-by-jason-payne/
It does also depend what sort of effect you're looking for. If you want to make it look like a boundary line, for instance, you might try a polygon with an Edge Fade, Inner effect on its sheet, and adjust that till it looks right. Or you could try adding a Glow effect to the various symbols involved, if they're actually the key things (though it sounds more as if it's the whole region you're wanting to highlight).
Best advice would probably be to keep experimenting and thinking about what you'd prefer to see; playing around with the options in the CC3+ effects is never time wasted, even if you can't get quite to where you'd originally thought you might!
After quite a bit of trial and error something that satisfies me came up. Ended up drawing some simple smooth paths, on their own "magical glow" sheet, with a large width and blur/transparency/blend/bevel effects. The first circle on the top left was supposed to be just a simple test but I am now tempted to have three main "magical circles" on the edges of the region. The smooth path needs to be a bit more precise, this was just a quick test run and I like the way it looks.
I am still unsure how I could highlight the fact that the region is elevated. I have multiple polygons on separate sheets with color keys and blend effects to achieve the vibrant greens in the middle of the forest. Applying bevel to each single on of them makes the map look like a bit of a mess. Would there be any solution to that? There's around 3 or 4 polygons in that region which all have different sizes.
That looks quite snazzy :)
If you mean that you want all those polygons to be the same size, then pick the best one, delete all the others, and copy the one good polygon to all the other sheets and by hiding all the sheets except the one you are working with each time, change the properties of each one to match its purpose on that sheet.
Be careful when you are copying one polygon to several sheets. It pays to have only one sheet visible at the same time, or you tend to end up with multiple copies on each sheet by accidentally picking more than one to copy.
Copy to sheet is found in the right click menu of the Sheets and Effects button.