Dungeondraft Advanced Tutorial: Creating Interesting Wilderness Terrains

[Music] hey guys this is a a a little bit different tutorial than i usually do we're going to actually do some terrain in this tutorial what you're looking at is the uh the terrain around one of the scenes from the town this is that big green box is the exact dimensions of the keep it's one of my premium maps it's one that's available in a facade and it's one that i intend to drop onto the top of this of this terrain here and so i just needed the dimensions outlined and what i'm doing here is i'm just picking my initial color palette and blending things that is a road that's going to be the approach up through some switchbacks to this keep that's at the top this is modeled loosely after that the tresendor manor however you pronounce it from the um vandal in town lost mines and fendell adventures so what i'm focused on here is you know initial layout and now i know that you know there's this this manner surrounded by ridges and i want this map to serve as a tactical battle map if there's ends up being battles here and i'm just evaluating my my ridge options these are from the forgotten adventures pack and these are all sort of the grassy ridges some of them have shadows some of them don't they come mossy and otherwise and i just want to compare them and kind of see what i what i think really kind of would fit with this motif so i've landed on this this particular one you do have to draw your paths in the correct direction and now i'm experimenting with um you know with how they how they should go how i want the switchbacks to go so if i switch it to shrink at the end it will create a tapered down effect and then if i switch it back to grow then i can draw continue drawing in the same direction with the same type of effect and you'll notice with dungeon draft the the tapering effect will continue to taper as you get longer and longer so the longer the the path the more it tapers at the end there so you can use that to your advantage it also may create some difficulties when you're designing maps but that's how the tool works in some places here i'm going to speed up my process because i'm just doing the same thing over and over again and i don't think you need to see all of that and now what i want to do is i'm going to grow and shrink my double path for my shadow and i'm going to create my own shadows along this ridge the light will collect at the bottom of the ridge so you need a shadow and this shadow is a double one because i want the the shading to fall on the ridge itself and on the ground just below so you can see i'm just tracing the point at which the the cliff meets the grass and because it keeps tapering my shadows you can also just stop your path and start a new one and it'll help avoid some of that that excessive tapering as you get really really long and i'm just putting points along the way i'm going to do some tricky stuff and actually show you what i do in the the json file for the map itself here in a little bit and now i i really like this cobblestone and dirt stuff i think it makes for a good path so i'm going to relay it into my existing path give it just a little bit more interesting texture imagine this path that one time was well worn and now it's not this particular keep is going to be in a destroyed state it'll be something that i have of a version of it that's not destroyed it's all very nice and it's something that would turn into a base for players for example of course there's other ways into the manor there's a secret path through the basement that's that's all been built out as well but now i'm experimenting just with the uh the grass path i really like this path it helps really sort of show where there's grass sort of creeping up around things otherwise you just have sort of the flat texture itself that comes with the forgotten adventures pack and you have to be careful what direction you're going here i'm also fading it in and out because i just want the grass to look like it's sort of fading and becoming shorter in some areas i don't want to draw like a totally hard line around this whole thing but you can see i'm just kind of approximating where it is and now i'll go back to my terrain tool and i'll pick my dirt again and i'll just kind of clean up some of the grass that's coming out underneath that path i don't have to get it perfect certainly there's paths with grass that grow into them i'm just doing a little bit of cleanup here so it's it's a little bit more like it's a well worn path and now i realize that i don't really like the the cliffs that i chose and i don't really want to go redraw all of them and so i'm going back to my cliff tool and i'm just again looking at my options i think i like that one so i could try to go do everything over again but instead what i'll do is i'll open up the the the file the map file i'm going to open it in this case i use sublime text but you can use any text editor and the reason i put that path that single path in there so that i could find it again in the in the text here and so i'm just doing a search for keywords that i know are in the cliff paths and i'm finding them i'm finding the ones that i've already placed and i'm just scanning through to make sure that i didn't place any other ones by accident or so learning how to just control f and find stuff in here is super helpful and now what i'm going to do is a find and replace so i'm going to take the path that i used and i'm going to replace every reference to it with this new path and i'm going to say replace all and then i'm going to save this and i'm going to relaunch dungeon draft and i'll open the same file over again now you may want to create a copy of your file i left mine open so i could control f but or i can control z but here you can see now all of my paths my clips have been replaced by this other asset in exactly the same way that i laid them out the first time now of course i still have to adjust because it's different artwork i have to adjust my my shadows so that's going to take a bit but this is i wanted to show you this technique in case you do have to make mass changes yourself in a particular map you know knowing how to use the the map file and how to navigate around it is super helpful i'm knowing how to fold code so that you can identify layers really quickly and delete them um how to change hex code so you can change your colors for you know a given map like really quickly or you can copy a map and make a whole new motif out of it these are all important things to know if you're going to do a lot of map making or if you want to like reuse assets okay now i want to put in some vegetation and so i'm using my scatter tool and i'm i'm using my select and my control keys to basically select multiple assets and i want this to be a mix of you know green and yellowing bushes and you notice that my my rotation is fully rotated so i can rotate in any direction and then i've got the scale able to you know go between uh 0.38 and and 1.78 and this is just to make these look more random i'm placing them all down at level 100 and vegetation i want this to be kind of like windy and maybe a difficult environment up here and so the vegetation is going to hug the you know where it has the most uh safety from the wind so that's why you're seeing it sort of mostly on the south side and and mostly hugging the cliffs here and now what i'm doing is i'm taking my shadows that i laid before and i'm moving them up to level 200 so that they're above this vegetation because these shadows would also cast a shadow on the on the bushes and shrubs underneath them and this is all just to use light to trick the eye into into believing that these things are all really laid out the way they're laid out now the next step is to go back to my double path and you know anytime you have changes in elevation you want to be thinking about how's the light interacting with these changes and in this case i think if the sun is coming from the top left it's certainly going to shine some light on these on the bottom right ones it's going to be a little bit less light so i'm just going to shade these in the way that i think the actual light might might happen around them i'm using the 20 tool i'm just doubling up you can always double up your your shadows certainly easy to go too dark with shadows you can see how i left those ridges on the top a little bit more exposed to the sun and now i'm going to make the shadows cast a little bit longer over the grass here at these these bottom ones and again you can always go into your edit points mode for your paths and you can fix them up the way you want it's also a good way to select a path that you can't get to because it's covered by other things you go into edit points mode and you just hover over your your path points and you can drag one free and once it's free you can you can grab that path and delete it or move it around now i'm grabbing the tree shadows and i'm going to decrease their scale quite a bit because i'm going to use these as shadows for the bushes you don't have to get this exactly right the way that light passes through bushes depends on where that the branches are and things like that but i'm going to put these these are at level 100 they're going underneath these bushes and what i'm doing is i have the scatter tool on i'm just holding down shift and i'm i'm moving my my mouse wheel or rotating my mouse wheel and it's letting me quickly move between sizes until i find a size that really for the most part fits the bush that it's supposed to go underneath it's just a faster way to do this process since these are all irregularly shaped assets again not trying to get this exact but a lot of times when you're working with natural settings like this you're just gonna end up doing a lot of the same technique over and over again now i want some pine trees i want them to be different sizes but pine trees you have to be specific with the rotation you see the shadows they have to point the right direction so i'm gonna set the rotation to zero and zero so they're always only pointed in that direction so the shadow's always falling in the in the right direction and again i'll use my hold down my shift and rotate my mouse wheel until i find the the size of tree that i'm happy with for its particular location and i'm still at level 100 here this time i'm set to over so i'm going to go over anything else because theoretically these would cover up any shrubs and now i'm going to do the same thing for these stones i think they match from a color perspective the environment pretty well again these all come from forgotten adventures now i'm set to under still level 100 but set to under so i can fall underneath anything else especially shadows and still using my scatter tool still rotating around with my mouse wheel until i find the right size for the placement and i'm doing all this because i feel like this could make a really neat tactical map you can see it's very large in scale those those squares are pretty small so you could do a lot with defending a map like this or battling up to it when this actually ends up going into foundry i'll use some creative wall height stuff so that you know visibility is obscured uh depending on the vantage point that you're at you know the players will have to make checks to to be able to scale some of these walls unless they try to battle up that the main road imagine these rocks at some point in the history of this this keep that they were maybe even a wall at some point so i'm kind of making them look like maybe they were they were intentionally put up here with some density to serve as as defense and now i've gone to my my trusty um circle shadow and because all of these objects especially these rocks connect with other physical things like the grass they're going to collect light and so i'm going to help nestle them into the scene by putting shadows underneath them and now you may wonder why i'm doing this i'm using my shadow path tool i'm using the the lightest one the twenty percent double and then um you know i'm growing and shrinking it and what it does it just helps you create um what looks more like natural terrain you know unless this was a golf course these aren't going to be perfectly flat areas and so this lets you create contours in the terrain you can see i'm sort of randomly placing them because that's how the terrain would look but it just gives you that much more of a feeling like this is a more organically developed piece of land and i'm going to delete that central piece because i've placed all my objects i know where i would have created conflicts and now i've got plenty of space to put the keep and now i'm just going to put some some roughed out train up here but you know maybe i don't want this to be keeper in my modular system i could take the keep out and i could put a campsite up here or you know i can put fort walls and i can actually build an actual like fort with arrow towers things like that these are all pieces inside my modular system that maybe i want to use someday and so i don't want to i don't want to waste this terrain on just one scene i want to i want to be able to use it for other things you know maybe in another campaign that i'm doing next year i pull it out and do something entirely different with it and now i'm going back to my my grass tool and this just shows the versatility of that path you know i'm just showing how these these things are just sitting in the grass and i'm imagining you know where i could see the grass sitting above them because you know these rocks protrude out in different ways and so i i won't show you all of these but you know i go around every single rock and i basically nestle them in that may seem like a lot of effort but i think it's worth it especially for me because i'm i'm creating these for a lot of people that need to reuse these and so the level of detail and stuff is just a little bit more important for the work that i do you may you may decide it's not worth it in in the particular ones that you're working on especially if you're just working on like a one shot just a little bit more ornamentation some stumps maybe the trees have been cut down from the area in order to create better visibility so but they also touch the ground so you want to make sure that they've got shadows under them like anything else otherwise they they sit flat on the ground and they don't look like they should look now i'm just evaluating my space figuring out how what i think about it and now i want to layer in my light so i've used shadow and now i want to use light again thinking like the sun is in the top left how would the sun light up some of these spaces and and help create this illusion of you know depth and differences in in height so i'm using the diffused light i'm using a very low intensity and this is feeling pretty good okay so now what i want to do is my entire town is available or can be made available in snow a snowy version and i want to be able to accommodate an entire you know winter or northern climate type of environment so i'm going to copy that entire level and make a new one in dungeon draft and this one i'm going to call my snowy level and i'm going to go in here and go to my original terrains and i'm going to change them some of them at least from what they were to a snowy version so i'm changing all my grass to snow essentially and i'm going to leave the the dirt and the other trains in there and then i'm going to get rid of a lot of my green vegetation including these you know grassy paths because they just don't work on a snowy path you can see how the snow lays into that cobble really nicely i really like that effect because terrains do have their own um levels within them that they'll they'll merge together like that pretty well now i'm looking at my my pine tree options i'm going to put them at level 200 i'm literally just going to place them on top of the other ones i still have my scatter tool on i'm still still going to change my rotations to zero so they're consistent but now i'm placing them you know on top of the the other ones it's just being lazy it's i could have gone and deleted all the other ones but i'm just gonna place these on top and then what i did was i deleted all of the vegetation all the bushes and now i'm going down to these these more snowy bushes and i'm gonna i'm gonna put them in essentially the same place that i put the other bushes so i'm gonna just compare levels to see where my other bushes are and i'm gonna just approximate that and i didn't take you guys through the whole thing but you can see you know all of those are now in place now what i want to do is i want to grab the shadows for the dead trees and i'm going to do the same thing i did before i'm going to hold down my shift rotate through my selections and the scatter tool i'm just going to put shadows underneath these bushes and these aren't the only shadows i'm going to create i'm going to i'm going to use my same circle shadow to also obscure the interiors of these if you've ever looked into a bush the interior is especially done when the interior is still obscured like that okay so now i'm grabbing this frost uh this is part of the forgotten adventures um overlays and effects and i'm picking a white color i'm at level 300 so i know i'm going to be above everything else and i'm going to frost all of this all of the rocks i don't like the pure white so i'm gonna drop it drop its alpha value so that's semi-transparent that'll help me see the rock underneath it and also helps you when you just want to spam things together so that it doesn't totally obscure the artwork underneath it and i'm doing the same thing if this is still my scatter tool i'm still holding shift to kind of until i rotate and find the size that fits that set the best but you can see now all of my rocks all of my stumps are now covered in in frost and now i'm going to add a little bit more snow just very lightly dusting it on my path we're getting pretty close to being happy with this this asset i'm going to put a little bit of this thicker snow on the outside i've got a couple of my paths here my grass this is looking like a pretty good start to a wintry version of this and there's a lot that i can do as a dm with with this map now i'm going to export these when you're exporting a map like this i recommend doing it at 100 pixels because anything more than that and then even after you do that you're going to want to convert it to a web p and compress it even further because these things can just be huge this is a like a 34 by 34 map and so i'll i'll do it at 100 tops unless there's really a lot of detail that i want to show my players but for performance reasons i'm going to want to keep it down and just exporting both of these layers they'll eventually turn into web ps and then they'll these will both go into in fact they are today in my compendium uh or my my module folder for foundry so anyway that was it i hope you guys enjoyed this let me know if you'd like to see more things like this from a nature perspective and in the meantime have fun making your maps

Channel: Baileywiki

Views: 26,267

Keywords: dnd5e, dnd, roll20, fantasygrounds, foundryvtt, battlemap, dungeondraft

Id: 07BR4BAQsiw

Length: 27min 22sec (1642 seconds)

Published: Fri Apr 23 2021