[WIP] Order of the Fist Monastery
MakeWayForJebus
🖼️ 10 images Traveler
First posting ever so go easy on me 😉
Overall not upset with how this concept is turning out! Especially pleased with the waterfall, as well as the brass compass rose and scale bar. Spent a while messing with contours but I think I'm starting to get the hang of it.
Next order of business will be paths, vegetation, and a village by the lake. And stairs, tons of stairs. After all, what is a monastery without a path of 1000 steps?
Comments
Looks like a great start :)
Day 2 - Definitely got a few more things figured out with contours and am psyched with how it's looking! Fixed the compass rose so the inlay shows through 😎
Added groups of trees and the Path of 1000 Steps. Next step is the village itself.
Update 3 - See, I said there would be a village eventually! Also added directions to solidify the monastery's place in the world.
A bit of cleanup and some detail work here and there and I think we can call this puppy done! Now I just need to figure out a way to use it in my campaign...
Update 4 - For real the last update of the day this time, then I'll take a break until tomorrow.
Looks like all that's left is to tidy up a few spots - particularly around the river upstream. A bit of mist hanging above Kimbunga Springs might be a nice touch as well.
I have been absolutely loving this project!! This is the first map I have done that was not primarily for a gaming session and not set in our campaign's world. I tried to use all the knowledge I've gained from watching the live mapping videos from Ralph and Remy - they have been super helpful in learning all the capabilities of the software!
Amazing job, especially for your first map!! I'm so glad you chose my master map for your starting point :) Next project.....maybe the interior of the monastery?
Update 5 - Had a bit of a hiccup when finishing up the map today. Got some details added and was trying to clean up and make sure everything was on the right Sheet/Layer before submitting when all of my sheet effects disappeared! Had to reassign everything from scratch and was not a happy camper. After an extra bit of unexpected tweaking I think it is finally ready for submission.
After more investigation, something is definitely wrong with the map file. I'm thinking something accidentally got moved when I unfroze the layers, but I'm not sure what would cause the effects to disappear. It also made my textures soft/blurry. Any thoughts or suggestions?
It does sound like some kind of computer glitch, as I'm not sure what would simply wipe the sheet effects but leave other things on the map untouched.
The textures going "soft/blurry" sounds as if it could be them showing as lower resolution than they should. That can be corrected by forcing the fills to have a fixed bitmap quality of "Very high", via the dialogue box opened by left-clicking the Display Speed Indicator icon, Display Speed Settings
. Ordinarily, while that shouldn't be necessary, it does rarely need to be applied under normal circumstances.
Beyond that, I think you'd need to share the FCW file here so our technical experts like Loopysue and Monsen can have a look at it and maybe troubleshoot the problems properly.
Thanks, @Wyvern, that's really helpful! I messed around with the bitmap quality like you suggested which did somewhat solve the issue; however, it makes the entire map look a bit grainy. I shared the FCW below in case anyone wants to check it out. There are still a few things I'd like to tweak, so it is not an official submission.
If it's any help, the issue occurred when I was trying to ensure everything was on the proper sheet/layer. I unfroze all layers and all-selected large groups of symbols to move around. Would something on the background, map border, or screen layer maybe cause this if moved somewhere else? I definitely found two extemporaneous items when going back and troubleshooting, but could not figure out what they were (they were not visible, but showed with an Info-List).
Quickly looking over the FCW file, I can't really think still what might have caused the Mystery of the Vanishing Effects. Some kind of general computer fault might be more probable, mostly because of the global nature of the event you're describing. This is merely a guess, however!
In regard to your mentioning the softness or blurriness of your textures, I saw you have a lot of sheets with a transparency and/or an inner edge fade effect on them. Both can sometimes weaken the appearance of fills - for example, even a transparency effect which is set to 100% opacity still makes the fill look paler than if the effect is turned off entirely. And sometimes effects can stack in ways that aren't quite what you might expect, when on the same sheet, or sheets next to one another in the map (such as bevels on adjacent sheets causing the weird spots that have become known as transparency acne, for instance).
I don't know if that may be part of what you're noticing here (I haven't checked which sheets have fills on in this regard), though it may be something else to check, just in case.
Still hoping someone better versed in the technical aspects of CC3+ might be able to step in and assist here though!
The scale of the rock fill causes it to appear a bit pixelated. You need to change the fill resolutions a bit. Try to go into Display Speed Settings
and change the fill style resolutions from there, just go in and divide every value by 2.
Thanks so much for your help and suggestions, everyone! I had a realization about the time zone difference this morning and figured it was time to submit things or bow out at this point. Submission in the other thread, but here is the final version.
Watched the most recent live mapping video with @Ralf and he mentioned how deleting certain XP entities would remove the sheet effects. This was definitely what happened here and now I can sleep at night (after I delve more into how that all works).
This was a great experience and I can't wait for the next contest.
Always use the ERA command to delete things, not the ERASE command. ERA protects critical special XP entities like the FSLOD CC3 drawing definition entity (and its children, EFFECTs) and the PALETTE entity, while ERASE doesn't know anything about them and will happily delete those entities if you use select all entities.