Dungeondraft Tutorial: Shadows. Techniques and tricks for working with paths, patterns and assets

[Music] hey guys we're going to be doing some shadows today i'm going to try to make this a relatively fast tutorial but we're going to go through all the things that you can do with shadows and some special tips and tricks a lot of you have methods before so hopefully you can jump through the time stamps in the video if you want to go check out something specific but couple things that we're going to do here we're actually going to start by going through krager's shadow and light pack he's done a great job of giving us a bunch of tools to work with just to kind of walk through them the very first one we get to are in the pattern shape tool by the way we're using a map of mine that i've been working on these are elements of a modular city that i've published so we're going to work on some of those pieces today so what i like about this tool this is the 25 opacity then there's a 50 and then there's a 75 percent and even 100 which i'm not sure why you'd use that but it exists and why these are helpful is not just because and i use these all the time to make drop shadows and other things but they're helpful also because if i bring up my path tool and i find my medium path which i have to be on and let me make this none it's nice because it makes no transition between this medium path and this medium floor piece so you can take a shadow and stretch it across any amount of space and you guys have seen me do this in like the frigates or the the tavern maps where you've seen me manipulate spaces to look really light or really dark using that tool other things that you've got in the path tool you people ask there's so many paths in here honestly i don't use most of them i just use for the most part the medium shadow path i use it because at one it's a pretty good path for just laying down under walls for example here's me laying this path down to make these castle walls separate from the ground below them but you can also make it really small and this is good if you're making things like curves and you can make it really large which helps you make you know really dramatic rooms and and manipulate your lighting in your rooms really easily so the medium shadow path is is where it's at and you won't go wrong with it if you'll notice here let me select those paths and delete them actually let me show you a trick while i'm doing that let's say you have a path and it's buried and you can't get to it you can go to your path tool edit points and when you're editing points you can actually just find the paths you can drag it out to where you can actually get to it and you can either either make some changes or delete it or change stuff over here and then move it right back to where it was just using the edit points but let's go back to that medium path tool and set my width to 1. and i'm going to lay these paths down and then i've got this like leftover corner here so what am i going to do with that well if i tried to round my path around it i get this hedgehog effect which i don't like at all so now that i've made a clean line on both sides i'm going to go to my object tools and in my krager shadow pack i have all these options and there's a ton of really good stuff in here that i use all the time mostly i use these circles up here to make drop shadows i'll go under an object like this and i'll paint some drop shadows i'll take off snap to grid so i have more control and essentially you're just painting in a drop shadow gives you a lot more control than any other tools that dungeon draft has and i've made a nice drop shadow there what i'm looking for is my corner piece and they're hard to see this just is what it is it's the nature of the the preview tool so i've got quarter circle medium and i'm gonna set its scale to one the same scale as my path i'm gonna turn off my grid i'm gonna zoom in really close and if i get it just right i can make a completely seamless connection that's what this is for and that's how you use it you've got to pay attention to your scales one and one and then you've got to turn off snap let's see i'll turn oh i'm sorry if you get your scales right you can turn snap to grid on and it does automatically make it flush for you so that's how you use these two tools together you'll also notice that there's colorable paths i don't know that those are helpful for shadows but they're helpful for lots of other things like this for example i've got my opacity set to 50 alpha and and i've just got some random color i think it's white but all of a sudden i can essentially paint i can you know make make the terrain look different i can change the color around a little bit more let's do something slightly reddish and you can create just some really fascinating effects with it so imagine you're working on a swamp or something and you have the ability to lay these down it's just really really cool and gives you a ton of control over the you know surface that you're dealing with now i want to show you that paths actually work with the spline so here i've got these kernels and i want to put a shadow between the cornels and the floor to help separate it so i've got my medium path i've got no transitions and maybe i should have a transition actually i'm not going to do it for this one let's try this so i'm going to turn my grid back on so i can see it and i'm going to start in this weird place i'm not starting underneath a a wall and now what i'm going to do is i'm going to line up these two points until they match and it's going to give me this nice curve i'm working at a 45 degree and that's why it gives me such a nice curve and you'll notice there's no hedge hogging anything like that and for some reason it does that if you use the spline tool it helps you avoid that effect here i've got my sides lined up again still snapping the grid and i'm maintaining this nice curve and now i'm going to stop i'm not going to go all the way in a circle because i'll show you why i'm going to end it there and i'm going to start a new one do the same thing use my shift tool before i click will create this pink line once it's pink that means your spline is engaged and now i'm going to end it there okay so why did i do that well now if i go to edit points you notice i have a great curve if i started my my curve here for example to end it here it's actually not going to give me a perfect curve you can see it's it's not going to follow this wall exactly right because it's not actually following a 45 degree angle so by following a 45 degree angle i can create a perfect curve and then i can just back off by deleting points so i'm pressing the delete key over each one of these points it turns green and you press the delete key this lets you make the curves that you want without um you know without having to compromise on anything so i love that it does that we're going to use the same technique down here what i'm trying to do is identify where my curves are this one i'll just draw completely in a circle and the way dungeon draft works is if you do draw a path that connects with itself it will connect it so all i did was just left click and it connected that path for me now what i want to do is create a drop shadow so i'm going to grab this piece of floor looks like this i'm going to copy it and then i'm going to zoom out i'm going to click somewhere over here i'm going to hit control v paste you see where did my shirt my floor go for some reason it comes way out here whenever you're pasting floor pieces i don't know why they'll often show up in this nether world out here and unless you're careful so you'll show you that again ctrl v if i just click here it's locked oh it could be lost forever unless you can go out and find it again so come back here and let's change this from this floor to the 50 opacity i'm going to turn off snap to grid so i can place it exactly where i want i'm going to put it down to level 100 and i think that's about the right spot and then i don't want any shadow to come into this gray area this transparent area because when i export it'll look odd so i'm going to try to grab my shadow and tuck it in just so it's on top of another material that way it'll come out looking like this instead of it it kind of takes a strange opacity when you export it but that's really basic drop shadow and then of course you can manipulate drop shadows from there if you feel like you want to just by editing the points you can kind of move them around so let me show you some other things and some examples of how i've used these these items here we've got two roofs these are roofs that are going on arrow towers that are going to be going on these castle walls and what i did was if i used grab it i created just a polygon so i went into my pattern shape tool created a polygon problem i think it's 50 and i just drew i kind of followed the lines and i drew what you see down below and that essentially just lets me show that the sun falling on the correct side here i did the same thing but i used different uh tools so here i just i turned on snap to grid and i just followed the design here but i used 75 opacity and then i used 50 and then i used 25 and of course a zero here and then that effect of course is that it looks like the sun is really hitting this this roof from this side and it's progressively getting darker as the sun goes around and there's even a flag this is actually an asset that you can use with forgotten adventures to show the shadow under the flag here is an alternative to the city walls these are four walls just want to point out some of the things that i've done here here again is that drop shadow that i made with the polygon i also used a really great path in krager's pack it's the double path i'll drag it out here so you can see it instead of having shadows on only one side and then an edge it's got the gradient on both sides and this is super effective for showing the shadows of beams and things that would cast a narrow shadow and you can see it's just a handful of these you know casting shadows should really be like probably like that because theoretically that's what's doing that um but it gives you a really really nice effect so like here for example this would normally just be a few a few shapes but when you add the shadows it clearly tells you that there's this is a you know a wood railing and a relatively light fence the sun is passing through um here it is again with the shadows falling on this this wood wall here and i think it looks really really outstanding another trick i wanted to show you so here we have just some walls and then we've got a piece of floor and what we want to do is turn these walls into archways so if i go to my path tool and i get my 50 path and i get to above 700 and they turn off snap to grid and i've just got it set to one right now but you can change this well now that gives me a rounded look the light hits it in the way that it would hit an archway and it works with any kind of flat surface you can also go to fade on both sides i'm gonna make this one a little bit longer just to show you what that looks like if you fade it gives you this nice little light like as if the light's hitting this side of the block so it's actually an effective and proper way for the light to hit the archway and now i've essentially rounded that archway as well i'm going to back this off a little bit if you round it too much it won't look rounded anymore and we'll do the same thing here we probably want that a little bit more actually it looks really nice what you need to do when using a piece of floor because it doesn't already come see this dark line around all these assets you can recreate that using the wibbly wobbly line set it to around one oh and you do have to take your fading off and a wibbly wobbly line just builds in slight imperfections so that's not a hard line and it ends up looking better to the eye so this looks like something i could have pulled out of the of the asset pack but it's something i just created by myself obviously we'll do the same thing for this one keep doing that it's just an easy way to make archways anywhere you want that look really nice at any size or scale that you want it's just a very effective tool so hopefully you guys enjoyed this and you learned something if you've watched a lot of my videos you've seen these techniques but you have to dig pretty far to get to them so i'll try to start to do some videos that are just focused on certain techniques like this if you'd like to see more of these or if you have questions about anything that i did or other types of shadow techniques that you've learned along the way by all means mention them in the comments thanks so much enjoy your map making

Channel: Baileywiki

Views: 21,304

Keywords: dungeondraft, foundryvtt, tutorial, dnd, battlemap

Id: pKru2cuUMuM

Length: 16min 28sec (988 seconds)

Published: Sat Jan 09 2021