Visually lower floor/emboss/interor shadow.

iskinner

So I am trying to make my first dungeon map with dungeon designer. Of course the very first thing I would really like to do, I can find no information on how to do or if it is even possible.

I would like a variation on the wall shadows that make it look like the floor is going into the map's surface as apposed to the common wall shadows that give the effect of walls rising out of the surface. This is for a cave system map and I think this would look nice. I have tried every combination of shadows, glow, and any other effect I think might accomplish this and I am really not getting it to look the way I want. I can get a bit of the effect with an inner glow, but since this effect is even all the way around the interior perimeter, it is only a very slight indentation and looks like the view point is straight down. I would prefer the more isometric look one gets with wall shadows where the shadows have a direction and the view point is above and to the lower right side. But the shadows need to be contained inside the room floor, which normal wall shadows are apparently not. At least I have not yet found a way to implement it in such a manner.

Does this make sense? Have I described the effect I am hopping to achieve? Is this effect possible? If so, how might one accomplish it?

If this is not possible and I need to put walls in, what is the simplest way to retrofit some walls around the perimeter of my nice cave system I have drawn.

TIA
Ian

Josh.P.

I learnt something last night that may help you.

You can added a black shape (or any color) and add a transparency effect (i used 50%) to make it look like a shadow. Below you can see i used this in the whole in the 1st floor looking through to the ground floor.

Example:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B_6BXlzLTlj8SV9RS0NOWGZESzA/view?usp=sharing

Monsen

What I usually do is to take a copy of the background, then multipoly it with the floor of my dungeon/cave, and put this new shape on a sheet near the end of the drawing order. This results in a shape that hides all shadows being cast on the outside side of walls, as well as covering up the outside parts of the walls, giving an illusion that the walls sink into the earth instead of rising out from it. If you have the Tome, this process is described in the Shadows chapter starting on page 223.

iskinner

Thank you, Monsen. That is exactly what I was hoping to find. Now I just need to figure out how to use the trace tool to retrofit walls around my nice cave polygons.

Monsen

A simple way to create walls that matches an existing floor is to make a copy of the floor, move it to the appropriate sheet, and then change the width of the entity. Once an entity has width, it turns into a wide line instead of a filled polygon, which can be used as walls, just set an appropriate fill style.