Roleplaying
As I’ve been working with my upcoming product, The Neverending Market streets, I’ve realized the need for more metal boxes. The metal box that everyone uses as a cash box for merchants is a metal box by greytale, and you will see it on almost every map with a store or a merchant, even Cisticola uses it. I’ve decided I’ll try to make a new set of metal boxes, and believe me when I say that this is by far the trickiest map related task I’ve assigned to myself.
This is the metal box made by the grandmaster of items, greytale at the nook, this is my raw model for what I am trying to achieve, with emphasize on trying.
First, blinded by my success with the tavern tables, I decided I’ll try to whip up a filter in FilterForge to do this. After fighting with this for a while, this is what I came up with, and I was less that satisfied. I would have let it do a year ago, but now I have set much higher standards.
So, in disappointment I turned my focus to Cheetah3D, as one of my main issues here was getting the metal right. I decided I’ll make a quick box, and render it using HDRI mapping and reflections, using two reflective textures with some bump maps.
OK, they look metallic, a little too metallic, more like a car hood than a metal box in a fantasy shop, so I decided I’ll do some fixing up in OmniGraffle, maybe that would satisfy my rather picky mood. I decided to use one of the dirt textures I’ve done in FilterForge that I’ve been using quite a lot on maps to dirt floors.
Then I created a polygon for the top of the metal boxes. Working in a large scale for this works much better in OmniGraffle, so instead of shrinking everything down first, then apply and modifications. I always try to work with the images in about 800×800 pixels or even more, doing scale down to 50×40 or something (as Dundjinni has 40 pixels / feet in scale) when I export it.
Now, I turn off the stroke(border) on the polygon, and then set the dirt image (as transparent png) as the fill image. This is how I pick the part of the image I want. Then I copy the polygon, and use another part, until I’ve put enough dirt in the lid.
This is one of the metal boxes in OmniGraffle with some layers of dirt added to it.
And this is the other box when it is done.
Yeah, looks ok, but I am still not satisfied, not really, no wow-feeling yet.
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