Making a Mountain
Mythal82
🖼️ 19 images Traveler
Hi there,
First off, apologies for the odd first post, doubly so if it’s already been answered - I did search the forum to try and find an answer but couldn’t find one addressing my specific boggle. I’m looking for a little advice regarding a map the bulk of which revolves around a single mountain.
Next, the context: I’m making a large CD3 map which is half outside a mountain at just above sea level, and half inside a mountain at a much higher level. The half outside the mountain is essentially a riverside trading port; the half inside the mountain a Dwarven citadel. As a result, I want to try and convey the sense of height of the mountain to my players who will have to regularly travel between the two sections of the city.
I’ve tried mimicking the notion of height using the cliffs from the annual entry, but the aesthetic becomes a bit of a ziggurat if I do so or, if I try to adjust the scale of the cliffs to address that, Terrible Things Happen. I’ve tried using various flavours of the Bevel filter, but by its nature it either provides for unnatural flatness or unnatural smoothness of the eventual look.
In any other situation I’d look to a straightforward bumpmap or heightmap to do the job, but I’m not sure if that’s the right tool in this case? If I just appropriately scaled and offset a bumpmap in the Displace filter of a sheet containing all of the mountain surfaces, to fill the entire map, is that the best way to approach solving the problem? Would that even work with CC3? Or is this something I should be looking to FT3 to solve?
If there’s an annual issue which addresses this problem (or one sufficiently similar that I could transliterate the problem), I’d be grateful for any pointer towards it, and similarly grateful if anyone else has approached a similar problem and found a decent workaround. Again, apologies for the wall of text and the odd question.
Comments
I am not 100% sure if this is exactly what you want, but have you taken a look at the 2020 annual for September? It is about adding cliffs/height to your city maps.
Overall, I do see an interesting challenge on trying to do a top down map that visually conveys the idea of different height for different areas.
Height in a CC3 map is always an illusion. We don't currently have any heightmap features in CC3. Automatic roof shading is achieved by a specialised normal map applied to each building the moment it is placed in the map.
CC3 normal maps are linked with the symbol file in the symbol graphics folder, and only contain information about how steep the roof is, and which direction it is facing relative to the sun as blue and red components.
The connecting cliff symbols have normal maps that function in the same way, which is why they look darker on the face away from the global sun once they are pasted into the map. However, connecting symbols don't scale - as you have already discovered.
If you want to make the connecting cliff symbols bigger you have to draw the line of cliffs at the default scale, and then scale the whole thing up as one long snake of cliff symbols, which is easier to do if you group them first. That can still be tricky, though, because it requires that you can draw a miniature version of the cliff line by eye, perhaps to one side of the map.
Alternative methods that you haven't already tried out are a bit more complicated. You could make your own relief shading sheet like this one I did for a city on a very steep island city, lit from the south east.
But that requires that you have an eye to see where the shadow needs to be in the first place. All good if you do, but if you can't see it in your imagination first I don't recommend it.
Another hand drawn method I've tried is explained in this blog article here: https://rpgmaps.profantasy.com/orde-on-the-rock-map-analysis/. It's a bit easier than Merelan City, but it will take a bit of time and care to set up. If I were trying to convert this map (image below) into a hollow mountain I would sink the entire city into a dungeon-style depression into the top of the plateau to give the illusion of a cave with the top of the mountain sliced off.
The FCW file for this map is contained in that blog article if you want to use it as a base for your own map.
These are not the only ways of generating the impression of height differences in a map. There are plenty more, like Shessar's tutorial here: https://forum.profantasy.com/discussion/9155/dd3-battlemap-tutorial-part-3-adding-contours
Thanks for the input - at least it's nice to know that I'm not missing something obvious. I'll have a go at a few of the suggestions, and see what I can come up with. Thanks again!
You're welcome Mythal :)
I've tried putting into practise a few of the suggestions made - There're still a few things I can do with lighting and shadow mapping and perspective, certainly, but I think it's a start!
So, further experiments with the lighted bevel have led me to a strange discovery. This is what the current experiment looks like in the editor:
It's still more a sampler to find what techniques work for the aesthetic I'm after, rather than the definitive starting point for a draft. But when I export the PNG, it looks like this:
Does anyone know why the discrepancy between the real-time view and the rendered output? Also, might it be the fact I use Lighted Bevel for the mountainsides and regular Bevel for the snow-covered peak which makes the snow one render 'properly'?
That is transparency acne.
The rendering engine gets confused if the pixels on two sheets are the same colour and decides that there must be a hole in the polygon on the uppermost sheet. The hole isn't really there, but that's how the rendering engine interprets the fact that the pixel hasn't changed colour between the two sheets.
This doesn't happen too often, but when you use polygons of the same texture on two adjacent sheets, and then apply a bevel, or an edge fade inner to the topmost of those two sheets, that sheet effect is applied to all the edges - including to the tiny square edge that exists around each of the pixel 'holes' interpreted by the rendering engine.
You can stop it doing that by adding another sheet between those two (we tend to call it a separation sheet), and copying the topmost polygons onto it. Then use the Change Properties tool to change the new polygons on the new sheet so that they are a solid colour that isn't likely to be in the texture (227 is a good one), and maybe a add an edge fade inner to make sure it doesn't show around the edges. The point of that is to make sure the rendering engine sees the difference between the underlying rock and the overlying rock.
Here's Phase 2 - fixed the acne (thanks for the help!) and added phased relief for each layer of mountain as I construct them - composited, they're at least giving the notion that the mountain has varying levels. Lastly, added some houses for scale - mostly to see if they 'looked right'. I took your advice and added a cut-out from DD3 to illustrate where the interior of the mountain would be modelled.
Looks like its going to be quite an interesting and beautiful map :)
This looks really great! You really inspired me to finally tackle Battlemaps for Mountain Terrains :D
I've a few questions about these effects:
1) How did you do the cutout?
2) How did you get that nice looking mountain fill? I don't mean the plateaus, they are obviously bitmap fills from CC3, but the one that's been cut out? That looks amazing!
3) Does anyone know a way to add an outline to the "top" part of the bevel? I know it's just an illusion, but we often add a glow to entities and having one at the bottom of the mountain but not at the plateau looks off...
Thanks!
1) That was just the default dungeon with a grey solid base and fractal tool.
2) And that was a snowy ground texture I found on OpenGameArt.org and imported.
3) No idea sadly - if I could do that, the mountains would look more consistent.
thanks for the infos!
So for 1) you just placed a fractal on top of it and gave it an inner glow to achieve this effect?