Recommendations for a mapping set/settings to use for a large snow-covered city?
Aimedtact
Newcomer
Apologies if I am posing this question wrong...
For my next campaign, I'm looking to map out a fairly large ruined city (high fantasy), half-buried under snow and I am wondering if any of y'all have suggestions for what might go best with that, ideally in CD3 rather than Overland (since I want to map out individual streets, locate important buildings, etc). I've got a fair bit of experience making maps for my campaigns generally, but I am a bit flummoxed on how to do snow as opposed to dirt and grass.
I did see that there was a winter mapping challenge about a year ago, but it didn't look like anyone did a full city and there wasn't a lot about how they did what they did in any event.
Any suggestions appreciated.
Answers
I'm not exactly sure if how I would do the buildings, since the snow would be slightly shadowed on one side and lit brightly on the other side of each roof, but I have an idea for the ground underneath all the symbols.
You could just draw patches of snow on a single sheet with an Edge Fade Inner sheet effect on it and call the ground 'done', or if you want a different more solid look to the snow on the ground, patches of snow like this take 2 sheets. I drew some blob shapes with the smooth polygon tool on the SNOW 1 sheet, using a solid fill with the colour set to a pale blue. Then I copied those shapes to SNOW 2.
SNOW 1 has a Bevel, Lighted effect on it.
SNOW 2 has several effects, designed to give the patches a nice flat cap of paler blueish-white
(the difference in appearance of this last screen shot is caused by me unchecking the "Restore Image" box in that Blur, Alpha sheet effect.)
I would have to think some more about how you would do the snowy rooftops.
I think there are snowy trees in one or the other of the free asset packs available from Vintyri. Links to download those sets can be found in this thread
The 4 Vintyri asset packs are each quite large. Maybe someone can help you with where they might be? I suspect the Dundjinni art, but I can't be sure.
The Cartographer's Annual issue for June 2018 was City Ruins, which might provide sufficient ruined structures of various kinds in a consistent style, by Pär Lindström. It's not that difficult to mimic additional items using the drawing tools with some coloured, broken lines of suitable thickness outlined in black (use the outline tool option, or simply add a small black/dark coloured Glow Effect).
Sue's already given some good advice on creating snow. You might also consider using some of the "T" fills from DD3 with a snow background, as these have transparent patches scattered over them which could look like grass or dirt showing through snow patches.
I may be in the wrong place, but this is the closest I've found in searching to coming to my answer. What are you using for that snow fill? for some reason all my dd3 fills do not load into cd3 and vice versa. All my fills for ss2 work in dd3. Is there a problem with my install that I am just to tech illiterate to understand? I just reinstalled everything and the error is persisting so I fear its deeper than that.
Fills are only available in the map they belong in by default. To use fills from other map types, they need to be imported into the map first. Quickest option here is to use Draw -> Insert file and insert a map file from the style containing the appropriate fills. Note that once you have the map on the cursor ready to place, you can just hit Esc instead of actually placing it, once you've gotten to that stage, the fill definitions have actually been copied.
As for Sue's snow, as she says in her post, it is using a solid color pale blue fill, so no special fills at all needed for that one.
The fills associated with any particular style only usually load automatically with that style, so you would not expect to be able to access DD3 fills when you have created a map in one of the CD3 styles.
Remy Monsen shows how to import specific fills from other styles into your current map individually in this Live Mapping Session here:
There are other ways of importing fills too. If you just want the whole set from another style into your current map you can either import a map in the other style and press ESC at the moment you are invited to paste it, or you can use Import Bitmap Fill Styles in the Tools menu. The first option is faster if you only want to import the fills from one other style. The second option is faster if you want to import all the fills from several different other styles.
An important thing to note here is that importing the fills only gets you the fills, not the drawing tools of the other style. If you also want the drawing tools to go with your imported fills you will need to pick them from the Drawtools style dropdown box at the top of the Drawing presets dialog (which opens when you click the Drawing Properties button
on the top toolbar)
EDIT: Ninjad by Remy, but we seem to have worked together without realising it :)
Thankyou both so much. I'm still new and was super struggling but that solved my issue :)
You're welcome, reido :)
It is quite all right to start a new thread of your own if you can't find one that really answers your question by the way ;)