Nov/Dec/Jan '23 Lite Challenge: Seeing the Red mist...

[Redrobes]

Go on then ! Let me have the map section of your choice. Its been a while since I have thrown a hat into the ring and since this one is going over Christmas this year then its likely ill have some break from the hustle to do a little something. Also I really need to make an adjustment to one of my programs and its perfect for dungeon mapping and it will give me a poke in the ribs to get it done for this. Then I might also be able to combine all of the results into one big map and have a zoomy of it, like most of the other combined mapping projects we have done. And with some skin in the game ill take more interest in it.

[Bogie]

Thanks for joining the Challenge and for offering to combine it into one map!

Here is your map section, it is the lower left corner of the Level 2 map, and the room info. As usuall, don't include the monsters on the map unless they are static like a statue.

Reminder, this map is made of 1 inch = 10 ft squares, but for the battlemap entry, we want 1 inch = 5 ft squares, so the map is going to be twice the size it looks like..

ToEE Lvl2-216.JPG ToEE-Text-213.JPG ToEE-Text-215.JPG ToEE-Text-216.JPG ToEE-Text-218.JPG ToEE-Text-221.JPG

Let me know if you have any questions.

Here is the entire level map for reference (thanks Straf)
LEVEL 2 CLICK HERE

[Redrobes]

Thanks thats all good.

Wow did they ever have some garish dungeons back in them days !!! This is not at all run of the mill grimy flagstones - no sir. Lapis and turquoise with blue glow and green and bronze. Very descriptive and a lot to chew on - hmm definitely out of my comfort zone here. I think I will need to make a sketch and note down all of that description in place and see what it looks like.

I would normally go for a fair attempt at realism but this is pretty unreal stuff to begin with so I reckon there has to be some lattitude in getting this rendered. It smacks of being done in Blender what with all the glow & water effects but I don't have a lot of skill in that app. But I think it does need some 3D work to make it look good.

Well learning some new stuff is what these challenges are for right ?

[Bogie]

I am sure there will be a lot of artistic freedom in the aesthetic of these maps, the prime exception is if the visual description is not just eye candy but part of a plot point.
Otherwise, make it your own.

[Redrobes]

I printed it and then marked up a rough sketch with felt pens just to see what we have to work with. It's going to be very colourful what with all the turquoise, green, serpentine, verdigris, and bronze.

Whilst I still reckon it would be best done all with blender I will use my basic 3D package just to get the rough shapes in and then texture it up with my own tool - which I did fix up with that bit of coding so it now runs many times faster than it used to. So I will be making a lot of masks for the texturing but first I think I need to build a height map of it for the walls, the pool, the dais and these fountains. I'll add in the really complex stuff like Gargoyles at the on top of it all. And then finally there is some green hue lights fading in so special effects at the end.

Looking at my sketch I will need to provide 4760 x 4200 pix. But for now all my images will be lower res and the texturing program is of no specific res so you can ask it to output whatever res you want and it will stay sharp.

There are a couple of oddities with the map. First of all at the corner of 217 it backs into the corner of 213 with no gap if we stick exactly with the grid. So since 213 is magically made or at least well made I will assume that it has a nice corner but ill round off the back of 217. There was something else in the description where it said that the statue in 213 was 4 feet from the side of the bronze pool marked B but on the map its a lot more so ill fix that up. And there is some weird east west mismatch in the descriptions so ill do my best with interpretations.

Although I am sure the walls were not meant to exactly form to the grid and the print is quite off, I will stick exactly to the grid since there are chicanes in the passages that match the grid and also the temple is of polished stone and therefore high grade manufacture. And if were going to put all of these blocks together at the end it had better match up with the grid.

So with that all said, here is my sketch and ill start on the height map.

### Latest WIP ###

[Falconius]

Regarding the touching corners. I had to solve a similar problem and since my grid are also quartered in Clip Studio I added a quarter (quarter of the 5ft square) thickness in certain areas, trying to maintain flat long walls where I could, but since some of the walls in mine are just a line thick it seemed like a reasonable solution.

[Greason Wolfe]

My solution where I had rooms/passageways butting up against each other was to assign a thickness to the walls (think I used 6 inches) and convert that to a number of pixels at the appropriate scale of things. Probably should have gone a bit thicker. But my working file is set at 36 pixels per foot, so each I ch is 3 pixels (inside the map, that is). You guys could probably do something similar that would affect the shape/dimensions of the various rooms only marginally.

[Redrobes]

I was going with 140px per 5' so that is 28 pix per foot. Well I have gone for 2' thick walls and created a mask and some shadowy patterns around them to give it a bit of depth (which doesn't include the shadows under doors.). I wasn't going to post this but I might as well. There's a bit of a ways to go before I get into this. But these are the kind of masks and grey scale source maps I will use to texture it. It will make more sense as time goes on. But this isnt part of the map just a mask used to drive the texture engine.

As you can see from it, I have sliced off the back end of the touching corners which I think is ok. I have gone for 4' wide normal doors and a pair of 6' wide when double doors. And where there is a concealed or secret door I have put it as just wall. I can add text at the end and provide a map without the text as a player map not showing the hidden bits.

[ladiestorm]

looks like a good start!

[Bogie]

Good progress Redrobes. Yes, these old maps always have some inconsistencies between the written descriptions and what the map shows. And bits that are hard to convert from a small scale reference map to a large scale battlemap. Just do the best you can and don't worry about perfection.

My favorite example was a room in which the written description included all the furniture in the room: a bed, a chest, 2 lounge chairs, a sofa, a desk with a chair, a dining room table with 4 chairs, a bookshelf and an armoire. All standard items you might expect, but the room it was all going into was shown on the map as being 10ft by 10ft. that is going to be a tight fit!