SC2Mapster

Hey Mozared, find me a picture that I'll have to recreate ;)

I might do it this weekend ;)

Ok so, I finally decided to do it today and to take a screen shot from Terhonator.

I discovered the hard way that I took a really hard picture. Haha. It is almost impossible to get the "ice" looking... and to feel the amount of snow also is really hard to get.

So, the "ice" isn't really looking as what it should be, the snow looks mess up, the terrain modeling is not exacly right, some textures aren't the good one for the color, the light from the bottom right comes from nowhere in the picture so I added a floodlight haha... Well, that's a 6/10 for the effort, but I would not do vertical ice looking again.

Good points are the general lightning on the terrain is good (well, looking at it now and it needs a little more light blue) and the forest in the back is great, not exacly with the same position, but I like it.

I will continue the winter theme with the one I already had done. Yes I know the mountains look nothing alike. I am incompetent with the height tool. ><

@Gradius12: Go

The problem with these kind of picture is that you can't create the feeling of very very far moutains. There is a little trick that we have to find out to do that. The fog is part of the trick ;)

Anyway, after my epic failing in ice, I got really inspired after listening to this music and seeing its picture. I have recreated something that has a pretty good atmosphere of pain, cry, lonely... Maybe I've abused a little of the depth of field, but it's a really hard tool to understand, I think I've got it not that bad.

@Gradius12: Go

I have to say, it is not easy at all... In fact even if it looks simple, it's really hard to get the far effect. To do so you can:

-Modify the texture repetition by doing: texuvset (number) (number) where 1 1 will look really ugly, and 1000 1000 will looks like Minecraft.

-Set the fog for the terrain texture set in the Data. To get a realistic fog, you want to change 2 things: the Fog Falloff to a very small value like 0.001 and then decrease the Fog Density to the amount you want. You might want to change the Fog Color as well.

-Add fog doodads in the far (maybe scaled really huge. Mixed with the field of depth it makes it looks better)

-Set the field of depth options in the camera settings

-Set the Shadow far option in the camera settings so you see the shadows even of very far units/doodads.

-Positionning well your camera

-Divide your map in sections to make everything "closer but farther"... Don't know how to explain, and might only work in some cases. Sometimes you can't do that depending of what is you're doing.

-Scale down things that should look big, such as trees in this case. You can also scale up the trees that are closer. This will make the smaller trees look farther more.

-Don't start (like I did...) with the maximum size of 254x254. If you know you need space, start with 128x128 and modify the map bound only when needed. Otherwise you might have some issues where you want to add something but you can't change the size... In my case I made it too large at first so I had to redo the mountains in a smaller way to fit in the camera angle... and even there they're not enough small.

-Always avoid seeing the map edge. This kills all the effects you want to create ;) Add more fog if possible, find a way to hide it...but don't show it!

Which would result in something close to what I've done. You also need alot of patience for modeling all the terrain... even if I took a couple of hours in it, it's still not yet the same thing. I also had a problem where my view was not enough wide to see everything... So my modeling is not well done to fit like it should. I just changed the aspect ratio, but it doesn't make it looks much better at all.

So, I wanted to copy the picture of Gradius12 and do my version. Somehow I've posted 3 wte this week. I very like my 2nd post and this one. Even if it doesn't look like the picture, it is still well done. ;)

Random fact: It took about 10-15min for my editor to do the action: Ctrl+A on the...5838 doodads. And yes, there are too many trees...

Both of those look great. You've got some skills. The scale is huge on that last one. My problem was that the fog was most intense on the floor level and not up by the mountains where I needed it to be. :P

Thanks for those tips. What is texuvset? Is that the same as tiling frequency in the data editor?

@Mozared: Go

Haha ;) Even if I'm not participating at all, I'm looking at what is done frequently ;) Sadly, I feel alone on this WTE. Haha