Yes, that what I was talking about, Sue:

i turned of the blur effects on the left one, so you can better see why that is not working for me:

the left one is I was going for originally, the right one is what I get if i do two wall shadows, one as wall, one as drop.

the two wall shadows have a strange interaction that the dropshadow does not have. But even if that was not the case (or if I ditch the wall shadow as you so kindly pointed out): I still cant get a proper treetop shadow. For that to work automatically I have to put multiple dropshadows next to each other and set a rather high blur, so they smear into each other and the underlying hack disappears.

I had one other "genious" idea: what if I just draw a big magenta circle over the treetrunk put that on a shadow sheet, make it a wall shadow as drop and then apply color key. Most of you will probaly instantly see that this does not work either. I did not see it, I had to experience it. The effect one gets is something like this:

or nothing at all if the color key is applied first.

I don't grasp a lot of effects yet, especially those that use some kind of a filter like the edge stripes and the displace effect, so maybe those are capable of adding an automatic treestop shadow that follows the sun, but the only way I see at the moment is to live with the fact that we can't change the sun afterwards and just hardcode a bunch of dropshadows.

Or just eyeball it and place the shadows manually on their own shadow sheet.

If we had a scale option in the wall shadow dialog, we could use your treetrunk symbols. I think those come in two parts. so we could make the roots on one layer (with a wall shadow if we wanted to have evening/morning feeling) then put the second part on a second layer, again with wallshadow but this time as drop shadow and scaled up. that way the two shadow effects wouldn't have this strange interaction, the second part would get blown up before the glow effect get's a hold of it and that way we could get sun following treeshadows semi automatically...

I'll trust you on this and made the shadows shorter (17 recalculations and reentering of the values, because drop shadow does not have the option to go with the sun and just define a distance and wall shadow directional interacts with itself, so that this couldn't be used. But both options wouldn't have helped anyways, as neiter of those two have an offset option that's perpendicular to the sun direction, so these shadows won't move with the sun anyways, ergo the only option is to keep the sun fixed and hardcode the dropshadows. yay :D)

Still looks nice. You where once again right, Sue!

Hi Sue :)

Thanks for the hints! It was the ripple effects you made for the marine dungeons I was thinking about.

It took me quite a while of trial and error to get the settings right for my mapsize, but now it looks gorgeous!

I still don't understand it enough to reproduce it on my own/come up with my own ideas on how to use this, but for now I'm very happy with the result :)

Next step: your hint about the drop shadow:

I'm aiming for something like this effect:

I thought I could get that by drawing two shadows: a wall shadow, directional for the tree trunk and one drop shadow for the tree top.

But for this to work I'd need an option for the drop shadow to be bigger than the original object. the only way I could achieve something similar was by setting the opacity to 100% and use a strong blur. but that yielded way to faint shadows.

But then it hit me!

Did I not just learn that if one effect is not enough, by the magic of using the same effect a bunch of times I might get what I want.

So I did a little bit of math, to get thy X and Y coordinates right and used 6 drop shadows that overlap on each other, and here we go:

Now I only have to play around a little bit to get the length of the wall-shadow and the placement of the tree top shadows just right and I can scrap the shadow layer I used to place the treetops by eye :)

Thanks for your support!

This is a reimagining of a battlemap I made a long time ago, but now done in Mike Schley stile:

I'm not quite happy yet with the shadows. I think I made the tree shadows too long. I'll play around with that a bit more.

Especially the shadows of the treetops: I placed them manually on a separate shadow layer. They seem to vanish completely, I probably made them too weak. Also the positioning is just guesswork. A drop shadow that's bigger than the object it is casting it (as if the tree stump was close to the light source) would be perfect to automatically generate treetop shadows, but I didn't find such an option.

The bevel effect on the high ground however looks really nice and I think it gives a good impression of depth. I'm quite pleased with that.

The little waterfall is a good start but I think it's missing something that gives it more live. I tried to add white lines with an edge fade and a dropshadow to simulate areas with lots of air bubbles and the shadows those would be casting, but that did not look good at all.

here is a closeup of the waterfall:

Does anyone has any ideas on how to improve on that? I think @Loopysue made some amazing water ripple effects once, but I don't remember the map annual she did it for :/

just wanted to bash together a "quick" battle map with the woodcutter style.

took me about 3x as long as it does Ralf, but let's not talk about that ^^

here is the top down view:

and this view let's you peek under the roofs (of the hut and of the trees ^^):

As always: any suggestions/remarks are always welcomed!