You can mess around with the global sun settings (right click the hourglass). Just playing with the Intensity a bit can give a more stormy appearance.

Though this only seems to affect the roof shading in this map. If you look at the shadow effects they are the same. To alter those you would need to adjust the shadow effects themselves.

Where you tend to use a lot of raw colour polygons and draw your own shadows, you could do something by playing with the palette colours, I guess, but that would be a whole lot more fiddly. Overcast light is much colder than sunlight. So you would need to turn everything more blue-greyish. Maybe a single overlay sheet might do it? Kill the bright hot yellows and reds a bit?

Hi Everyone! :D

In this week's Live Mapping session Ralf will be adding shadow and light effects to a dungeon map from the ground up, i.e. on a map that was not set up to do it before.

Come and join in the chat live on YouTube here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jpQetrH8yb4

Or watch it right here on the forum if you prefer.

Oh wow guys!

Has anyone else checked out the new ambient lighting setup? You can set the ambient light (in this case dark blue) when you pick the colour of the shadows in the finalize effect.

This is partly true, Dalton. Though a lot of what a symbol looks like is controlled by what the artist does inside the artwork. On the left is the current boa symbol, while on the left is the one I'm working on in light of the flatness issue.

The rattlesnakes will be a slightly bigger problem, since they are really quite rough-skinned, so they don't have a glow down the back like a boa does.

Incidentally, if anyone is wondering how these things are made with a view to making their own snake symbols, check out the brushes top right in this shot. Affinity allows me to draw a perfectly straight snake (which looks really odd considering they never lie in a dead straight line), and then convert that image into a brush. So once the initial drawing is done I can draw the shape and apply the image to that shape.

These are the original dead straight boas used to create the snake brushes.

It works a bit like a cross between symbols along and a connecting symbol, with the central section of the snake repeated as many times as necessary to generate the length.

I think the second option is a bit too plastic looking, so I'll probably use the third version below.

Thanks :)

I haven't started the symbols yet, Jim, but there will hopefully be a nice collection of various bits of debris to dump in the channel. And there are a range of 6 flavours of fluid to pick from - at the moment. I will add more if necessary.

These are all 'proto-fills' and will hopefully end up looking a lot more interesting on the day.

@Talaraskan It's not the most beautiful step I've ever drawn, but this is the general idea of using single step symbols along a line. Is this what you wanted to do? If it is, then the answer to that part of your question is "Coming soon..."

Hi Everyone! :)

In this Thursday's Live Mapping session Ralf will be using the first style of the 2008 Cartographer's Annual to draw a map in Pete Fenlon's classic 1980's RPG map style.

Come along and join in the fun :)

I did a little work on it last night as well starting with the angles shown at the base of each building, but since it's rotated quite a bit my solution involves using a transparent bitmap fill for ease. Is this what you were thinking of?

Happy Easter!

I painted this for mum last night, but it won't go on the scanner bed. It's a bit big, so there's a shady spot to the right where I'm not very good at photos.

@MatthewBertram - CC4 Overland started on a Spectrum template ;)

Something more like this?