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.

Hi Everyone :)

This week, Ralf will be looking at another classic overland style that comes with basic CC3+, the Herwin Wielink Overland style. You can watch it here:

Or you can come along and join in the chat on YouTube here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jhWA30Ox-8U

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.

@Quayuazue - I had too much of a headache to get on with what I was supposed to be doing, so I found a laurel wreath I used in another design and made this vector symbol for you. Here is the FCW showing you how to use it on shields of more than one colour like the examples you gave (basically, draw two shields on top of one another but reverse the colouring on the top one, add a Color Key, and then place the laurels symbol on that top shield).

And this is the symbol catalogue containing just that one symbol so you can open it in any FCW file you have going.

If you don't want to use it as a color key shape, but want an actual black or white version you can clone and edit copies of it.

This is a free symbol, so don't get all hung up about rights and modifying it. It's literally something that helped me forget the headache ;)

Not much further, but there's some work to make the various shades of white look ok with each other.

A bit like this (though these are very raw at the moment and need some roughing up)

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.

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.

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

You're welcome :)

Remy wrote a really nice blog that contains all the information anyone might need on managing colour palettes if you are interested here: