Live Mapping: Roof Shading
Loopysue
ProFantasy 🖼️ 41 images Cartographer
This week in our Live Mapping session we have a special treat for everyone. Ralf will be examining the roof shading options in City Designer 3 and demonstrating how you can create your own roof-shaded symbols.
Come along and join us live to ask questions or make suggestions here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E2zoaQqTRAo
Or you can watch it later here on the forum:*
*This thread isn't monitored during the show, but is a place where you can discuss the topic or ask further questions before or after the show.
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30 minutes! :D
This was super informative. Thank you, Ralf and Sue and Remy.
Ralf mentioned in the video that Sue sometimes uses 3D modeling software to create a flat export of the map file. That may be well out of scope for these discussions but I'd be curious to learn more about that, or at least hear which 3D software is used so I can try to learn on my own.
I used Blender back in the day, but you can do the same in a bitmap editor with radial and spherical gradients.
These are the 2 layers used for a dome shader in Affinity Designer - 2 gradient shaded circles.
The blue element is the pitch of the roof, created with a spherical gradient. The brighter the blue is the more flat it is, so the top of the dome is very bright blue (255), while the base of the dome is very dark (128).
The red element is a radial gradient from black to red, like this:
The red layer is 'added' to the blue layer using the Add blend mode setting on that layer, so that where the red is black nothing is added.
I think I may have uploaded this before, but here it is again if you want it.
I have added the necessary 1 green to the blue layer, so if you use this png as part of a map file it should also work as varicolour.
As promised here are my reference files for easy access to the different roof map settings
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Excellent! Thanks Ralf :D
I would love to get the steep and not steep conical 'domes' as well, it you have them , either @Loopysue or @Ralf
What shape are you after, exactly?
As a dome goes through all of the angles from 90° to 0°, there is no such thing as a steeper or less steep dome (a cone has a constant angle). You can have only a section of a dome that doesn't start at 90° - for that simply take only part of the dome image, basically a smaller sircle with the same center, instead of the whole circle.
I actually meant a cone - like a witch's hat. I noticed you had them saved on the photoshop program you used.
They're in the zip. This is a list of the files included:
In addition to this supply if you want a shape that already exists in the PF asset collection you might copy the VH map file for that shape to use as a source for your own new symbol.
Just to clarify things a bit before everyone starts making a ton of house symbols - you can share symbols you draw yourself, even if you have cannibalised parts of existing ProFantasy map files to create the map file part of your otherwise brand new symbol, but it is not ok to share symbols that are modified versions of ProFantasy assets. If you want a dome that is the same as an existing one, but just slightly different, you can do that and use it in your own maps (including commercially), but you can't share the modified symbol itself.
If you are in doubt about a particular symbol you want to share, it's best to ask first.
Thanks, Sue.
You're welcome :)
There are a couple of other tips you might want to bear in mind that I don't think were mentioned in the live stream.
The biggest one is about the tone of the colours in the image part of the symbol. If you look at the PF assets you will see that the majority of roofs have mid tone colours. These work best with map files since the shading and highlighting will never take the colour past 0,0,0 (black), or 255, 255, 255 (white). Where there are black lines, such as the ink lines in the SS5 roof images, it's best to erase the map file to prevent strange side effects in the finished symbol. Ralf demonstrated how to do this using a selection mask in the video. The point of mentioning it again here is to say that very dark or very light roof images won't necessarily look as fabulous as you thought they would.
Another reasonably important tip is to try and give the image reasonably sharp edges if you can at the resolution you create them. This will reduce the likelihood of any ghosting around the edges in your maps.
For overhead maps, if you can render your item as a heightmap (for example, putting a shader that maps the color to the height above ground) then you can use Wilbur to load that heightmap and create a PF normal map that precisely represents that geometry using Texture>>Other Maps>>PF Angle Map. Wilbur can also be used to generate simple geometry like cones, spheres, squares, and so on, but that is usually a painful process for anything but the simplest thing. It can also add noise to the heightmap to make things look a little rougher.
I keep meaning to write a converter from the traditional RGB normal map to the ProFantasy angle map, but it's never made it very far up the priority list.
As Sue pointed out, the shading calculations in CC3 aren't linear because they very much favor saving the original art details over getting the shading correct. The washed-out appearance of the shading (and peculiar results in the edges) is the result. Again, as Sue pointed out, you very much don't want to do any smoothing on your normal map if at all possible and that includes when downsampling it. If you average together the light direction from several surfaces, you'll get a light direction that is completely wrong and will look wrong in the image.