Great work, Hans :)

To me, the main building there is reminiscent of the Tyrell building from Blade Runner.

Good map :)

While sheet effects like Wall Shadow, Directional might have been easier than hand drawing the shadows, the specific length of the doorway and window lighting would have been tricky, so you have probably done better by doing it this way.

You don't seem to have added any shadows to the vehicles and interior furniture, though. I might add a shadow effect to the symbols sheet to make them pop up a bit.

I meant that you can't do the same thing with a wall shadow because you wouldn't be able to 'cap' the open doorway lights like you have with the polygon. Your solution was a good one.

Unfortunately, I don't think Colour Key's work on shadow effects. I seem to remember trying something like that myself a while back.

You seem to be working this map on quite a complex level. That's good. I do stuff like that myself quite often. Regarding limiting the glow of that fire to just one side of the wall...

Try adding a new sheet that is just above the floor and drawing a circle of bright red/orange on it, then add an Edge Fade, Inner (EFI) sheet effect from zero to about 20% opacity, and a Blend Mode effect to that sheet in that order. Set the Blend Mode to overlay, or any mode that works to blend the red with the map in a similar way to that glow, then add a Colour Key effect to that sheet between the EFI and the blend mode, and set it to that nasty bright green (so that it doesn't interfere with the red glow in any way), and draw a bright green shape to mask off the bit that invades the wall and the next room.

I would do it by adding a series of new sheets - one for each step of the stack, and adding a lighted bevel effect to each sheet.

You might have to add a backing sheet between each one if you are intending to use the same texture for each layer. That's an identical copy of the polygon in a different solid colour immediately beneath each level. It prevents something called transparency acne from happening.

Hi WizardOfFrobozz :)

The result you got is very typical of using Offset on a very complicated polygon. If you imagine each node projected the set distance away from it's origin at a perfectly perpendicular angle to the line of the original, you should quickly see how a large offset will case most, if not all of them to fly off and cross over each other on the way. That's what causes the triangular shapes.

A suggested cure for this is to copy your landmass onto a new temporary sheet, hide all other sheets, use the SIMPLIFY command to grossly simplify the coastline of the temporary land shape, and then use that as the base of your offset. Once done, you can then moved the offset shape to it's proper sheet.

You might still find there are issues with a few crossed over nodes, but it should be a whole lot easier to use the node editing tools to put them right.

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SIMPLIFY is a keyboard command you type and hit enter or space bar. The command line will offer a default value, which expresses the minimum space the command will leave between adjacent nodes on the polygon you simplify. You can adjust this by typing a different number and hitting enter. You can also use CTRL+Z to undo the operation and adjust the number again if you wish.

EDIT: actually, I think Monsen's suggestion is better ;)

You're welcome :)

You could search for "Anvil" In the Symbols folder, but I'm not sure if there is one.

If not you might consider downloading the free third party assets from Vintyri. I remember someone else wanting an anvil not so long ago and a comment on that thread about there being one in one of the Vintyri distributed sets, but I'm not sure which one it might be. I have a suspicion it might be the Dundjinni collection. All of the Vintyri sets are really huge. If you go that route you will want to pay close attention to the installation instructions in the guide that comes with the installer.

Links to all the free stuff can be found here:

Thank you, both :)

I tried rounder hills, but they jarred pretty badly with the extremely sharp mountains, so I made them more pointy to achieve a smoother transition. They grade to lower and smoother, so it is only the larger hills that have pointy bits.

The style is deliberately slightly cartoonish ;)

Maybe the solution is to use TRACED on one symbol, and then delete the symbol and make a new vector symbol from the tracing. Then you could make them as transparent as you like and use other effects on them too.

@Fersus I think it will be published quite a bit sooner than that. At the moment the target date is April.

@JulianDracos @Quenten It is quite interesting that two of you have commented on the pointy hills, where over in the FB Group no one has mentioned it yet. It seems to be a matter of personal taste.