alhoon wrote:MichaelTumey wrote:
Here's a link to the full scale version:
Ryukyo (which literally means Sea Dragon City)
Michael, I would like some help with a map please.
I primarily use fractal mapper 8, and I need to make an underwater battlemap (i.e. 1 square = 5') Can you point me to some free-ware site please?
Mainly, I need some "sea sand" and "coarse sea sand" for fill in the ground, some "watery" texture like you have in the above map and some objects for the bottom of the sea, like corals or sea weed etc.
Someone in this thread has pointed me in the past to a nice site that had things for my starwars maps and things for dungeons, but I haven't find anything for underwater maps.
As for transparencies, I think a couple of levels of blue-ish (one for "Ground" level, or for "deeper" level) would do the trick. What do you think?
And in case you haven't guessed, it's an "in the way encounter" till the PCs reach that underground city you so generously provided.
Sorry, I didn't see this until now. I get lots of my surface textures from
http://www.freetextures.com.
However, I also take digital photos of ground textures and use that more often than textures online. As stated look to the Cartographers' Guild for textures too. I use to live on that site, and am a major player there - my name there is Gamerprinter.
Layers of transparent blue, are what I used in the above map. I place 'water layers' under each ground layer, with one top of everything else. It's how the hues go monochromatic blue at the lowest levels in the above map.
As for the water texture, I found it on a water filteration company site - I forget the link, but it was just a texture of blue water with waves and highlights. I use it as a seamless texture with transparency. The highlights show well, while the blue water tends to disappear, but it work great to show refracted light on the upper underwater surfaces.
Don't hate me, but the owner/programmer of Fractal Mapper 8, gave me that program for free at Gencon 07, when I told him that I print maps for RPG gamers and publishers from my
http://www.gamer-printshop.com website. I never use it to map with though, only to print maps in Fractal Mapper format.
Of the seaweed and coral, I haven't found many top down views of such, so everything in my map was created by me using other software for specific effects. In some cases I created 3D objects using Nendo and modeled from scratch, then rendered in Raydream Studio (old 3D software I have handy) on a white background with shadows cast, then convert to PNG file in GIMP, then imported to Xara, the vector program I do all my mapping. In some cases, I used Xara to create beveled objects, then converted to vectors, broke the shape apart to create ridge like coral formations. Some of the seaweed are free 3D objects I found online on a site long gone, I render in Raydream, etc. Some of the seaweed, especially the meandering stuff is using an odd paint program called PD Particles - which is cool (but odd) paint tool to create all kinds of realistic and abstract plant like shapes with adjustable preset brushes. So I'm using lots of tools to get the variety of shapes I need. I even have the first version of Z-Brush, which was much inferior to what that program does now, but makes great anemone like shapes - which are in this map as well.
I know that's not an easy solution for you, but it's how I got what I needed.
