Ok. I think it's coming along pretty well. The main thing I would adjust if I was using it myself for a map is the hills. I would use effects and settings similar to those found in SS5, though I adjust those to make the bevel lighter again than it is in the template.

The HILL sheet uses polygons of "Solid 20", and my personal settings for the Bevel, Lighted sheet effect give the hill a highlight as well as a shadow. It's personal taste, of course, but I find the template setup makes the hills a little too dark for my liking.

These settings also use a lot more smoothing than you have in your template. It gets rid of the knife edge ridge which feels a bit unnatural for a relatively small hill - unless they are meant to be mountains.

Having sufficient edge fade on the hill after the bevel also helps to make the hill look like it's a rise in the ground, rather than something stuck down on top of it - a curve into the slope rather than a sharp line, or a line that hasn't been faded enough with a wide enough EFI. I increase mine from 10ft to 15ft, though it could be wider.

Thanks :)

I did a quick sampler of all the forest and woodland drawing tools with the tool names shown for identification.

The trees from Darklands are quite dark compared to other styles, so you won't get any lighter trees than the jungle ones.

I think you might have the blurred FOREST SHADOWS sheet above the FOREST* sheets (above in the map - below in the list). That would cause the blurring seen in your shot. Check to make sure the sheets are in the right order.

As for the drawing tools themselves, the forest ones all seem to be in order, but the last two woodlands drawing tools seem to have a higher than expected density. I don't know if this is intended or not.

Did someone let the were-rabbit out again?

Is this better?

The reason I'm adding the real world names is to give us a reference for further instructions. It's easier if you say change "Fred" to "Burt", than if you give me a lengthy description of where you want a label that doesn't exist yet.

Hi Everyone! :D

Tomorrow's Live Mapping session sees Ralf going all 'Tolkien' on us and taking a look at the "Classic Fantasy" vector overland style from the Annual Vol 9. He will also be discussing using and customizing hatch styles.

You can watch right here on the forum:

Or you can come and join in with the live show on YouTube here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=57aVGl7LUPw

Hope to see you there!

Please can I do the village of Elkton, from the Alarius North Central map?

On the Bevel, Lighted it is possible to make the bevel concave by increasing the value of the Slope Curve.

With a bit of fiddling you can reverse the shading to show the effect of a hollow by unchecking the Global Sun Direction and setting the Azimuth to 180 degrees from the global sun settings.

With the ordinary Bevel, you can't make the curve concave, but you can reverse the shading by checking the Invert Colors box. That would make the polygon appear to be sunken instead of raised.

A little more progress - a few more houses converted from DC to WV

Yes to all of those combined questions.

Most of the terrain fills in Darklands are plain coloured polygons, with the exception of 2 actual bitmap textures (scrub brush and scrub heath). You can see this if you turn off the sheet effects on the TERRAIN COLOURS sheet, as I have below.

In this image I have also hidden the DIRT sheets at the bottom of the list to make everything a bit easier to see.

Here they are again with everything showing and all the effects switched back on, but without the blur effects active.

You may notice that there are two terrain fills that have no drawing tools at the left hand end - the pale pink and blue. These are the colours I reserved in that row specifically for a snow terrain fill. However, I never got that far in the development of the style, so all you have is those two colours. Pure white, by the way, is generally speaking not a great idea, since it gives the impression that there is nothing there when you use it in a colour map. You will see this more clearly if you google snow from above, or seamless snow texture. Most of what you will get is varying shades of blue and blue-grey.

So, you actually have a choice of two colours you could use for snow, or a mixture of both. The real problem is that because I never got around to doing it there are no varicolour mountains that you can turn conveniently white, or part white. There are hills, but the mountains only come in one colour right now.

You can, of course, duplicate all the mountain symbols and make your own varicolour mountains. That is up to you, if you want to go that far, but then you also have to consider there are no snowy trees, and no varicolour trees either.

The instructions on how to make varicolour symbols, if you want to have a go at this, are contained in the Tome of Ultimate mapping. And/or, if you don't mind a pretty long WIP thread I could help you with them here on the forum.

On the progress side (or lack of it today) I've had quite a struggle getting the gradient shading of the map file correct so that the hollows around the dormer look filled with snow, and everything the right size and shape to be the same as the original but with a layer of snow on it. Not sure how all this is going to work when I start combining them, but we'll see in the morning now.