Well, this new challenge sounds like fun, so I'm in.

Challenge announcement thread.

I have to confess that I was already working on something to make a Christmas card for my family, but no map as yet, just a couple of textures.

Here is an idea for anyone else who wants to join in: you can use almost any texture for snow by turning it some shade of white using the new Colorize sheet effect ;)

I've made some snow, and a bit of ice, but that's about as far as I've got.

Looks like a great start :)

Hi Everyone :D

In this weeks Live Mapping session Ralf will be looking at the expansion of the Marine Dungeon style that is the December issue of the current Annual.

Come along and join in, or watch the recording later... :)

Ok. Part 2 has been prepared and handed over for processing, so this thread is probably done with (for now anyway).

Here are a few close up shots of the part 2 details, though I wasn't able to put all the burning trees and roof fires in the example map. That would have been faintly ridiculous :)

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.