Loopysue
Loopysue
About
- Username
- Loopysue
- Joined
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- Member, ProFantasy
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- 10,041
- Birthday
- June 29, 1966
- Location
- Dorset, England, UK
- Real Name
- Sue Daniel (aka 'Mouse')
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- Cartographer
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Vincula, the City of the Mountaingate
I often use the Street tool to fill everything out, and then pick buildings to delete and replace with something more special. I built Orde with the House tool, making the special buildings first. In fact I think the only buildings in that map which aren't made with the House tool are the large rectangular ones with courtyards in the middle, which were drawn as polygon roof pieces and then shaded.
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Vincula, the City of the Mountaingate
You can pick several different house styles and have a random mix of them. Most of the presets are mixed. Click the Street Settings button and add another 3 different house types to your mix. The road on the map was populated by a single swipe of the Street tool using the 4 style mix you can see in the dialog box.
This is good for getting the basic fill of a city, and yes they are a bit the same even though I now have a nice mix of 4 different colours, but the idea is that you use a range of Street settings (remember to save any you edit under a new name so you can get them back).
Once the filling in is done you can then pick and delete houses here and there and take the time to draw a slightly more special shape using the House tool. Remember that you can add dormer windows and extensions. I used those tools a lot in Orde.
Once that is all done you can then add more little details, like garden boundaries and trees. That's all Orde is - a load of random street stuff jiggled around using the move tool, and with special buildings and trees added. Plus the city wall and the canyon of course.
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City Cliffs - Incorrect Textures and other problems.
The fills you are showing above are only the fills for the bonus issue. These are the fills for the main issue of the cliffs - the ones I think were missed out of the very first installer.
As you can see, on my system at least there are two folders, though this might be because I created the fills. It's sometimes a bit difficult for me to know whether something is there because that is where I created it, or because the official PF installer put it there. The other folder is identical to yours, but I still have the original texture generating files in a subfolder within it.
EDIT: That solid Limestone fill is a source fill, which is one I made as a precursor to the other limestone fills. It probably got left in that folder when I was packing everything away. It shouldn't be there, but in the GTX files subfolder that only I have. That folder holds all the original artwork.
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Completed: section as regional map
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[WIP] Post Station
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.
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[WIP] Post Station
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.
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How would you go about creating a stack effect?
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.
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Best way to accomplish "edge striping," but with a tile/bitmap fill?
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 ;)
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My mountains are dissapearing





