How to "blend" different terrain fills
Parsley
Newcomer
Basically the title is the question. I'm coming back to CC3+ after a long downtime period, and I'm having a lot of trouble figuring out how to, for example, blend the mountain background shade and the desert background shade. Or any two terrains. One terrain will blend into the default land background just fine, but when I put two together it just clashes and looks terrible. I've tried placing them on separate sheets as well. Nothing so far works.
Any advice?
Comments
This is tricky to answer without knowing exactly what style you're using, but I suspect the "clash" problem is either because both the terrain fill polygons are on the same Sheet, or that they're each on their own separate Sheet, but the Sheets don't all have the same Effects (or possibly any Effects) applied to them to soften the edges of the polygons to make them blend better together.
Entities placed on a Sheet have the Effects applied equally to everything on that Sheet, so if there are two overlapping polygons, only the outer edges of each will be affected by any Edge Fade Effect on that Sheet, for instance. Where the two overlap, you'll end up with a sharp line if the two polygons have different bitmap fills. (If they have the same fill, you shouldn't be able to see that divide at all.)
If you set up the polygons on different Sheets, make sure you copy the Effect(s) on the original Sheet (assuming it had a suitable blending Effect, like one of the Edge Fades, that is) over to the new Sheet as well.
If that isn't what's causing the problem, I think we'll need some screenshots or the FCW file here to try to advise you further.
So they are on separate sheets with the same edge blending effect applied, but this is what happens. I just can't get it to blend in a more organic way
Are you sure those are on separate sheets? The look you have there is the standard look when they are on the same sheet.
You can check which sheet an entity is on by using the Info -> List command.
Huh, they are somehow on the same sheet. Which I don't really get since I'm checking a different sheet box when I put down the desert. How do I actually change the sheet it's on?
Drawing tools select their own sheet by default, so users won't have to manually set the sheet before using a tool (Nor needing to know which sheet to pick).
You can manually change the sheet of any entity using either Change Properties
or Move to Sheet (right click Sheets and Effects
)
Finally! It worked! I just created a clone of the terrain I wanted on another sheet, and it looks so much better now!
Thank you so much! This had been giving me all kinds of trouble
I'd like to see a screen shot of your adjusted effect. The one you show is kind of spiffy because the effect you have suggests an intermediate transition to me between two elevation levels. While it looks nice, I fear it would just confuse gamers when they are taking terrain into effect for movement and line of sight purposes.
This is what the completed section in question now looks like. In the geographical context I'm going for, this is your standard desert caused by mountains blocking all the incoming weather from the west.
That looks good, Parsley :)
Thanks, that looks good although the effect is not quite what I anticipated. I an not sure what I expected.
I like this ... but I think the vegetation symbols and oasis are too large compared to the mountains. I would reduce their scale by half (which you can do via the Symbol manager>Scale - just select all symbols requiring scaling.
Glad you'd got this sorted @Parsley !