Roleplaying
Today we’re gonna break to something very different. No more map props today, but I am gonna show you a technique based on the almost classical cisticola walls that I have shown before. We’re gonna make a truly natural looking canyon with running water.
First, we scrutinize CGTextures for some great looking pictures to use as a base for our work. We need foamy water and an edge.
I found four different pictures, two of each kind, that was perfect for what I am going to do with them. These are scaled down, the original ones are about 3000×2000 pixels.
So, now we cut smaller pieces of the pictures. We cut about six or seven different water pieces, and dirt pieces, and about ten different pieces of the edge.
Now, we run one of my home brewed filters for FilterForge, and blur edges of a picture and give it a pretty randomized edge.
This is how the different pieces look, a small pick of each type displayed here, against white background, as transparent png images are were bandwidth consuming.
Some water overlays
Some stone overlays
And some of the important edge overlay.
Now, we start Dundjinni, and just fill an area with your favorite forest foliage, and then draw a about 10 feet (2 squares) wide riverbed, using another stony ground texture. I used these two, with 6-8 variations in each set, showing just one of each here. Those were made using ImageSynth as I have described before.
One riverbed watery stones texture and one wood ground with flowers and dirt. I also added a few stones to the ground of the canyon, to give it a more wild look.
OK, now, we start to build the canyon. first, we add the dirt overlays on the “wall” of the canyon on both sides. making them as a cover object, we can just Control-Click to get a random item from the set, at a random rotation, exactly what we need.
Then, we do the same thing with the water overlays, in at the bottom of the canyon. Now, we carefully place the edge overlays, aligning them so we build a nice edge. This is the most time consuming part of the whole operation, but worth every second when you see the result.
This is the result, and it is built using Dundjinni. I really hope you liked this, cause I do.
Now you may wonder what prevented me from doing this is OmniGraffle, nothing. But I just felt that I should do this one in Dundjinni, and mostly because Bogie, who won the last map competition at the Dundjinni forums, selected that the next theme is waterfront, and this is a little start for my waterfront map.
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