How do you make your own terrain fills?
JulianDracos
Mapmaker
I was thinking of making a Darkland overland map. I noticed that it does not have a snow terrain. Other than white, I am not really sure what it should look like. In any case, I was thinking of making my own terrain.
If I were to start creating my own terrains, how do I go about it? What files do I need to make? How do I create a tool for it? Can I create my own terrain, default version of it so that it always shows up?
Comments
Yes to all of those combined questions.
Most of the terrain fills in Darklands are plain coloured polygons, with the exception of 2 actual bitmap textures (scrub brush and scrub heath). You can see this if you turn off the sheet effects on the TERRAIN COLOURS sheet, as I have below.
In this image I have also hidden the DIRT sheets at the bottom of the list to make everything a bit easier to see.
Here they are again with everything showing and all the effects switched back on, but without the blur effects active.
You may notice that there are two terrain fills that have no drawing tools at the left hand end - the pale pink and blue. These are the colours I reserved in that row specifically for a snow terrain fill. However, I never got that far in the development of the style, so all you have is those two colours. Pure white, by the way, is generally speaking not a great idea, since it gives the impression that there is nothing there when you use it in a colour map. You will see this more clearly if you google snow from above, or seamless snow texture. Most of what you will get is varying shades of blue and blue-grey.
So, you actually have a choice of two colours you could use for snow, or a mixture of both. The real problem is that because I never got around to doing it there are no varicolour mountains that you can turn conveniently white, or part white. There are hills, but the mountains only come in one colour right now.
You can, of course, duplicate all the mountain symbols and make your own varicolour mountains. That is up to you, if you want to go that far, but then you also have to consider there are no snowy trees, and no varicolour trees either.
The instructions on how to make varicolour symbols, if you want to have a go at this, are contained in the Tome of Ultimate mapping. And/or, if you don't mind a pretty long WIP thread I could help you with them here on the forum.
I found the colors in the color pallet of the pink and blue you used. I do not really see them anywhere else. I suppose the easiest thing for me to do would be to duplicate one of the tools like green, but then change the polygon color and save it under a different name.
But what if I wanted to make a terrain fill like dirt? How do I go about that?
As for varicolor symbols, I do not the Tomb of Ultimate mapping so I will try there first. Although what I think I would want is snow capped mountains and not a full snow. That might require opening up the mountain symbols in GIMP and doing some editing there.
Ok, a dirt fill... I assume you mean an actual bitmap texture and not a blended colour like the rest of the terrain fills... would have to be a seamless texture. It's no good wanting to know what I use, because my main seamless texture editor is a piece of abandonware. It wasn't when I bought it a few years back, but it is now, and I wouldn't recommend that anyone buy it new today.
You can make seamless textures in quite a wide range of other apps these days with varying results depending on what you start with. Or you could look for one online to modify (though remember the copyrights on 'free' textures from sites like Textures.com often prohibit their use in anything other than personal projects, which is a whole lot more limiting than the PF EULA - so watch out for that).
Mountains - I strongly recommend copying the VH res files of the symbols you want to modify to a separate folder before you start altering them, so you don't end up altering the originals by mistake. And just because its usually the next question - yes, you can make your own modified PF symbols, and you can sell maps with those symbols in use. You just need to be aware that you can't share the actual symbols you make with anyone. They are for your use only.
I assume by a seamless texture you mean a single texture image instead of an image made up of a repeating pattern of the same texture.
What dimensions do I need to make the texture? Do I just change a tool to a bitmap fill and select the newly created texture to create a terrain tool?
Most fills used in CC3 are seamless. That means the image can be tiled side by side or top and bottom without the join showing. Like this. (I've moved them apart a bit here to show what is meant).
Most fills aren't that big - about 1000 px square, though some I've made are 1500, 2000, 3000 px square. It depends on how much variability you intend to put into it. If you have whole hills in a fill that can be really repetitive if you don't have a bit enough patch to put them in. Consider that if you import a fill that is 2000 px square, to match the resolution with the symbols you have in the map it should really be scaled to about 100 map units, or 100 miles/kilometres (overland symbols are usually 20 px per map unit).
To make a new drawing tool for your fill you could start with one of the two bitmap fill tools already available in the style, select it, then hit the New button and set it up to put your fill on a sheet of its own with its own edge fade, etc.
If you were making a fill of trees like the one above, I've written a short blog about how you can do that in CC3, but I doubt that will be relevant to a dirt fill. https://rpgmaps.profantasy.com/generating-seamless-tiles-part-1-making-seamless-tiles-in-campaign-cartographer/