Map Skills
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This tiny Guide is aimed towards eye-candy and mapping as a whole, no step for step explanations how to make one specific nice scenery.
Author: Reinfire
| Table of contents |
General tips
- Keep in mind that everything in this Guide is based on my personal opinions and experiences. There are no written laws for scenario design, and many designers will use other methods than described in this Guide. The Guide is aimed towards the more inexperienced designer to get some ideas about methods you can use, but it hopefully contains some useful things for expert designers
- Always keep in mind that scenario designing is no exact science. If you make a piece of eye-candy, don't spend too much time in measuring distances between objects . It doesn't matter really much if you make a row of objects, and there are slight (READ: slight) varieties in the distance between them. People who play your scenario won't speak ill of your eye-candy just because one object is one or two pixels off the place where it should be.
- Get to know all the objects in the objects list. If you know what objects are available in which category (nature, embellishment, units etc), it can save you much time in looking for that one specific object you want to place. Browsing the entire objects list often gives you ideas for your scenario.
- Never stop experimenting. Even when you have been designing in a game for 10 years, you still haven't used or seen 1% of all the possibilities of the editor. Experimenting is the only way to get that one piece of scenery which will make your scenario stand out from other ones. Copying ideas from other people's scenarios won't make your maps great. Try to be unique.
- When you save your map, and load it afterwards, it may occur that some objects have disappeared. This is caused because they were to close to other objects. This can (READ: can) happen with "Underbrush Great Plains" (under Embellishment) and "Ruined Wall"(under embellishment)
Basic tips for terrain-painting
I don't like the mix terrain tool, so I make all the terrain mixes by hand.
- First make one base terrain. Which base is best, you have to decide for yourself. A few examples of base terrains are Patagonia - ground_clifftop_pat (for cities), default (for plains, forests and grassy areas), Texas - ground5_tex (for deserts and arid areas), Rockies - clifftop_roc (for winter scenarios) and Bayou - ground1_bay for marshes and rainforests)
- I think it is not difficult to see that large patches of one single terrain look pretty dull. So make your base terrain look nicer, add some spots of other terrain to it. Be sure that the terrain types fit each other, 4 or 5 different terrains is enough. Note that terrains are categorized, so for example, you can use 4 terrains from New-England terrains, which are accustomed to each other.
- To add bits of terrain fast and random on the base terrain, I use a method I call "spiralling". To do this, set the brush size of the "free paint" tool on small (1x1), and make fast, circular movements across the base terrain. This method is fast and effective.
Tips for natural environments
- Trees are welcome in every type of natural environment. Of course the tree type and density depends on the environment you are creating (deserts have a lower tree-density than a tropical rainforest). You can experiment with adding different tree-types to one area (New-England trees and Great-Plains trees is not a bad combo), but this is not necessary to create a nice environment, since within one tree-type, the variation is pretty satisfactory.
- Trees alone won't do, you will also need some plants, grass and rocks to cover your ground. You will find much of these objects under embellishment (you may suspect all of these things to be under nature). Here is a list of some objects you can (READ: can) use for different environments:
Grassy areas, forests, plains
- Embellishment – Underbrush Great Plains
Deserts, arid areas
Embellishment – Underbrush Pampas
Embellishment – PROP Underbrush Desert
Tropical rainforests, marshlands
Embellishment – Underbrush Amazon
Embellishment – PROP Underbrush Jungle
Embellishment – Underbrush Carolinas (3rd)
Embellishment – Openbrush Amazon
Snowy areas
Embellishment – Underbrush Rockies Snow
Embellishment – PROP Underbrush Snow
Objects for multiple area usage
Embellishment – Underbrush Carolinas (2nd)
Embellishment – Underbrush Patagonia
Embellishment – PROP Cliff Foliage New England
Embellishment – PROP Underbrush Forest
Nature – PROP Shoreline Rocks (1st)
Embellishment – PROP River Northwest
Beside these basic objects, you can also add special nature objects here and there, but don't overdo it. A few examples of such objects:
Embellishment – PROP Big Prop New England
Embellishment – PROP Big Prop Texas
Embellishment – PROP Eagle's Nest
Nature – PROP Eagle's Rock
Try to spread all of these objects as much as possible.
- The cliff tool of AoE3 is very crude IMO. This tool can make some nice effects though. For example to make high cliffs at the ocean. I don't use this tool much, but when you do use the cliff tool, try to make it match the surrounding terrain
A substitute for the cliff is to make rocks like the ones in the AoM cliff-tool (if you played AoM, you will know what tool I am talking about). You can create this with the "raise/lower terrain" tool and the "Free Paint" tool:
Alternative cliff
Don't forget to add "SPC Path block" (under embellishment) around the edges to make it solid.
- To give your area that little extra touch, you can add elevations to it. A way to do this fast but effective is this:
- Use the "Raise/lower terrain" tool, leave everything on its default settings
- Make random single clicks on the area you want to add the elevation on, both left and right clicks (raise and lower) at the same time.
- Finish it off with a little bit of the "smooth area" tool
This will make your are look much better
- For seas and large lakes/rivers, you can best use the "paint-water" tool, and for small rivers you can best use the river-tool. But when you use the paint-water tool, don't forget to smooth it out. When using this tool, you often see lines of sand(or something similar) below the surface when you are finished. Get rid of that with the "sample elevation" tool. (right-click on a place of deep water, and left click to remove these sandy lines). You may want to keep the underwater-sand near the shore though(to make it look more realistic).
- Pure water areas look bare. In small ponds and tiny rivers you can fill it up with the following:
Embellishment – PROP River Plants
Embellishment – PROP Marsh Plants
Embellishment – PROP Underbrush co....
In seas and large rivers, you can also make the water look better by adding shoreline rocks:
Nature – PROP Shoreline Rocks (1st)
Nature – PROP Shoreline Rocks (2nd)
Embellishment – PROP Shallow Rocks
Tips for villages and cities
- It is handy to know how buildings look in different ages with different civs. To make this easy for you, I added pictures of buildings in different ages and different civs on the bottom of this Guide. (appendix A)
- Cities have to be really FULL. The fuller your city, the better (this rule has limits off course). Besides the buildings, you can fill your city with parks and embellishments. For streets, using the objects "SPC City Streets"(under embellishment) has the best effect.
- Don't hesitate to add nature to your city/village. Looking at a city completely made out of bricks and stone makes it look cold. Trees can be placed just about everywhere in your city, without ruining the scenery. The long grass from "Underbrush Great Plains"(under embellishment) is also great for filling those gaps in your city too small to make a real structure.
- These embellishments make your city/village look more full and alive:
Embellishment – PROP Colony
Embellishment – SPC Train Parts
Embellishment – SPC Railway Props
Embellishment – SPC Mine Props
All – Crate
Note that not every embellishment fits every area in your city/village.
- Take in mind that when you uses recourse crates as eye-candy, that you don't want to have settlers too near it. The same thing counts for treasures and heroes/explorers.
- Walls and fences are important in your city. They arrange the overall structure. It is amazing how some walls around gardens, buildings and the like can add to the quality of your city. These are potential walls/fences you can use to create "order" in your city:
Buildings – Wall
Embellishment – PROP Wood Wall
Embellishment – PROP Rock Fence
Embellishment – Ruined Wall
Embellishment – PROP Native
Units – Native Villagers
NOTE: some walls don't block units, this can be fixed with "SPC Path Block"
- Walls that make the border of a city or fort can be a little more complex than just a "fort wall" or a "wood wall". Experiment with different layers made out of different types of wall. A little elevation makes your walls look higher and bigger.
- When you add a railway track (trade route) to your city, keep in mind that the railway-track is a little wider than the trade-route you see in the editor. Also remember that the train doesn't stop exactly where the track ends, it goes a bit further. It may give some unwanted effects when you place a building or road for example to close to the end of a trade-route.
Building Meshing
Building meshing is one of the most difficult divisions of eye-candy, and it requires a healthy amount of insight and fantasy to use this effectively. Building meshing is nothing more than placing multiple buildings (and some embellishments) over each other to create larger, more impressive structures than just the default buildings. It is difficult to give much useful information about this. Not every designer uses this as much as others. I myself am a huge fan of building meshing. For one-floor building meshing (without using elevation) there are little tips. The only thing you can do about this is experiment
- You can put your buildings on, around and on top of elevated terrain to make the rise up into the air. I find that using rectangular elevations work best by far. You will find that with a round elevation, it is difficult to get your buildings on the side in the area where you want them.
- Try to have a little symmetry in your building meshing (especially when using elevations). This will look best in far most of the time. It doesn't have to be symmetric in every way, it just have to show traces of it.
- In building meshing, walls are your friends. You can use fort walls and corners for the bottom of your structure in may occasions. The palisade walls on the bottom of your build list can be used to fill up spaces just about everywhere, and so there are more uses, ruined walls (under embellishment) are great for Aztec/Mayan/Inca structures, as well as bridges:
Bridges
- The elevated terrain should be covered as much as possible. Wood walls present a good solution, but flat wooden objects like "SPC Port"(under buildings) and Railway PROPs (under embellishment) are also very useful for this.
Remember that there are flags sticking out on top of some buildings. In the worst case, you have 12 flags on top of your building, which doesn't add much to the eye-candy.
