[Intermediate] Empty Fountain & Dry Riverbed

A good way to challenge your FM skills is by trying to recreate (or improve) someone else's map. It forces you to solve problems you might otherwise just walk away from as "too hard".

In this case, I was recreating a map from an old RPG adventure module. In front of an ancient tomb sits a large font that once was the (magical) source of a river. The font is described as a 100' diameter cement basin with no apparent openings in the bottom. It empties into a dried riverbed that cuts a path through what is now barren desert.

What I came up with isn't perfect, but I'm generally happy with it. Here is how it is built.

The desert floor is simply one of the FM8 'Battlemap' patterns set to a large scale. It is the yellowish pattern almost exactly half way down the scrolling display, right above the dark brown roof tiles.

The river channel is a closed spline curve filled with another 'Battlemap' pattern. It is the one six above the 'sand' pattern in the drop-down. The border of the channel and the desert looked 'fake' when it was a sharp line, but improved dramatically once I applied a 'Feather' blur effect to the riverbed. Now it looks more like soft sand overlapping dried mud. Well, to my eye, anyway.

The font was constructed from three overlapping pieces. The bottom is for the drop-shadow effect, the middle is the 'concrete basin' of the font, and on top is a nearly transparent radial fill used to give an appearance of curvature/depth to the basin.

First I created a circle the right size, filled with solid black and with no line around it. I copied this to the clipboard, so I had an unaltered circle to use as the basis of the basin later. Then I selected the one still on-screen and applied the drop shadow effect to it, adjusting width and offset until it looked right. To avoid the jagged edges of the black circle itself protruding around the edges of the basin that would sit above it, I scaled it to 98% both directions.

[Why not just apply the drop shadow effect to the basin itself? You can. I just find it annoying that the drop shadow effect changes the resolution of the object you apply it to, usually making it grainier or 'fuzzier' than you intended. So I've gotten in the habbit of creating drop shadows as separate objects placed 'underneath' the object that casts them. A little extra work, but I'm picky that way.]

Then I pasted the copied black circle from the clipboard on top of the shadow circle to create the basin. I changed it to a concrete-looking fill. This one is the grainy grey one about two-thirds of the way down the 'Battlemap' drop down, just above the grey stone block fill. To give it a rim, I applied a 'Frame' bezel effect to it, and played with the scale until it suited.

So far so good, but the 'basin' looked more like a flat coin then a shallow bowl, so I had to come up with a way to give it the illusion of depth/roundness.

To do this, I pasted yet another copy of the black circle on top of the basin. This I converted to a Gradiant fill, black in the centre (top of the gradient fill dialog) and white on the outside (bottom of the dialog). I played with the relative transparencies of the black and white areas (see the picture of the dialog below) and moved the 'handles' of the radial fill so that black was in the exact middle of the basin and white just inside the 'rim'. Then I used the transparency slider in the bottom right corner of the main FM8 window to set the overall transparency of this top circle to about 50%.

This gave me what you see in the picture at the top of this post; a darker caste in the middle shading to a lighter caste toward the rim. Not perfect, but it does give a decent illusion of depth. I've added this to my stock techniques, and now you can try it out. Let me know if you come up with an improved technique.

(Note that I've made this sound all carefully executed, but in fact it was a lot of trial-and-error. As most new techniques are when you are developing them. Hopefully I've saved you that process.)

Cheers,
Christopher