a bit of help/advice please
I am trying to create some outdoor battle maps.
what I want to do is use cc3+ to create a background something along the lines of what this page shows:
http://www.bloodofthemage.com/tutorials/battle-map-tutorial-03-non-repeating-ground-textures/
I am unfamiliar with a lot of the terminology so I am not sure which tool or menu item would help me do something along similar lines to the process in that link?
thanks in advance
what I want to do is use cc3+ to create a background something along the lines of what this page shows:
http://www.bloodofthemage.com/tutorials/battle-map-tutorial-03-non-repeating-ground-textures/
I am unfamiliar with a lot of the terminology so I am not sure which tool or menu item would help me do something along similar lines to the process in that link?
thanks in advance
Comments
My system keeps overheating, so I only have a very short time to suggest a couple of ideas before I go again.
The technique described by the page you referenced can be emulated by using related fills, like soil, sand, rock and grass (all of which are available to you in the DD3 textures) on a series of sheets (that's what we call our equivalent to PS layers) overlayed on each other with a couple of simple Sheet effects on each one - like 'edge fade inner', and 'blend mode', or 'transparency'. Using polygons to only cover some but not all of each sheet will also help.
DD3 also has variable transparency fills. These are the ones that look like dirt/grass/stone, but with snow on them. These white areas are not snow, but transparent areas.
If you have not done so already, I would strongly recommend working your way through the simple tutorial in the CC3 user manual to get used to what everything does, before launching yourself into this task.
I hope that helps - and sorry to be so brief!
Hopefully one of the others will be able to fill in the details or suggest better/alternative ideas than mine
This links to my old page, but on it are links to the bitmap fills and two example maps made with them.
something along the lines of this
Would it be possible for you to upload a in image of the map you are practicing on - to give us a better idea of what kind of suggestions to make? We could probably be more help if we could see exactly where things are/are not happening for you
That would be a lot more difficult, unless you used a piece of software designed to create tileable textures, like Genetica, for instance.
I have made a couple outdoor maps that look somewhat reasonable, other than the ground texture has that repetitiveness to it
Have you tried setting up 3 sheets with different effects on them and drawing irregular polygons of the same texture on all three of them, for example to vary the colour of the grass between the sheets?
This is an overland example, but I have far more of these than I do of dungeon maps just yet.
A similar thing has been done with the trees.
(Please ignore the rivers - they are in draft form!)
There are still some repeats, but that is because this map is unfinished. To remedy them I will probably add another sheet and vary the texture again.
parts of it look ok, but some of the polygons look forced and obvious
In the new Experiment1 file, add an "Edge Fade, Inner" sheet effect (EFI) on each of the grass sheets (all except the background), to fade the edges of your polygons, setting it up a bit like this:
[Image_6923]
What you can see here in my screen shot is the Edge Fade Inner Effect being used to soften the edge of the LONG GRASS with the BACKGROUND short grass. (Both these fills are from the Bogie's Mapping Objects Collection, but you can do exactly the same thing with the fills available to you in DD3 if you haven't yet downloaded Bogie's Collection)
You will see that I have used an EFI effect on all the grass sheets (there are three short grass sheets getting paler going up the slope), to blend the edges over the white stones (ringed yellow)
This map I am using as an example has only just begun, and since its primary purpose is to field test a set of tree symbols I've made I'm not too concerned about repeating patterns in the grass right now. If this was going to be a showable map one day, I would patch over any remaining repeats in the back ground grass (the darkest short grass) with little polygons of the longer grass - polygons that would probably be no bigger than the trees in extent. I would also use the smooth polygon tool to draw them, so that there were no straight lines to catch the eye. You can change the straight polygons to smooth ones on your own Experiment1 map by right clicking the Fractalise button on the left (near the change properties button) and selecting "Straight to smooth".
If I'm not making an awful lot of sense to you right now, please don't be afraid to ask questions.
still - seems like a lot of work to have to randomize the bitmaps. I would have thought a computer program would have a way to do this for me
also its a small map, only 100x100, with only grass on it, haven't even put objects in it, and its already over 1mb file size.
I've looked at several video tutorials but never seen one that really gets into the details. this is why I am struggling so much on this
appreciate the help
If this isn't right for you then nothing lost, but I hope it helps
EDIT: I also don't know why the file was so big for you. Its just over 300 kb on my system, which is practically nothing. I have a city map that's approaching 2.5 MB, which I have been reliably informed by a member of the Profantasy Team is about medium sized for an FCW file
i'll delve into the settings you created so I can understand whats going on
I think the only things I changed about the settings were to set the 'outer transparency' on each of the edge fade inner sheet effects to 0, so that the grass faded to nothing. The rest was fine. I think I also removed quite a lot of extra nodes to make the patches you had drawn more curvy. Straight lines don't really help when you are trying to mimic something organic like grass.
Basically it was already there. You were just being hampered by the scale of the fill, which was really tiny and very scrunched up. I wouldn't have been able to do very much at all if I had stuck to the original scale.
what sort of effects would I use to make those blend in - so that it doesn't look like its just dirt laying on top of grass, but rather a dirt patch within grass, or a rock embedded within the soil that is sticking out of grass
If you are using symbols just add them to a sheet above the grass.
If you are going to use a texture you can either change the background texture to your desired stony or rocky texture and cover up with a bit more grass if its just too much, or you can add patches of your chosen texture on top of the existing grass. I don't know how much rock you want to show, so I couldn't really say which method was best, but if you only want a couple of spots of rock here and there then I would suggest adding it on top, using an Edge Fade Inner effect - making sure that the outer opacity is set to zero - adjusting the inner opacity and the width of the fade to get the desired results.
I would also draw the new patches of rock with the freehand tool and change path to poly by right clicking the fractalize tool - make sure you have the right fill selected in the fill box before you start drawing
Does that help?
I note from the sample texture you showed earlier that you would probably only want about 75% Inner opacity setting, so that the rock is never too dominant in the resulting mix
This is awesome. +1, +1, +1.
Mind if I try to turn this into a tutorial? Won't be able to for some days, but it seems like a critical skill/knowledge set.
Thanks LordEntrails... even though I suspect that I might have picked this up from a uTube tutorial about blending textures in PS a few years ago, and simply adapted it to the way that CC3 works. I just can't remember where I saw it, or what it was called for the life of me!
You are welcome to do a tutorial for applying the technique to a CC3 map if that's what you want to do - however, I agree with Lorelei's suggestion, in that it would probably be better to check the TOME first and see if there are alternative methods for doing this that may actually be better or faster, and play around with things yourself before you make your mind up about showcasing this particular work around
I will do this