Best way for Building Roofs?

[Aabra69]

I am curious how everyone creates the roofs of buildings for their battle maps. As a test I put the following together... I used a black-white gradient layer in overlay mode at 30% transparency to create the shadow on the texture.... it turned out..... ok I guess but I can't say I'm really satisfied with the result. I was wondering if anybody had any tips or tricks for doing this kind of stuff?

Edit: Attaching new image - previous one had half the shingles going the wrong way.

fLkvcAO.png

[jfrazierjr]

I dint see any issues with the roof
..I would tone down the outer shadow though.

[Mouse]

Hello Aabra

You say you are curious to know how other people do it. I can't say how PS/GIMP/Krita users do it, but CC3/Dundjinni users, and users of similar purpose built dungeon mapping software tend to stamp premade symbols from catalogues onto their maps, like these CC3 ones here:

new-1.jpg

If you look at the interface you will see the catalogue of houses shown as a palette down the left hand side of the map.

EDIT: I forgot to say - in CC3 the rooftops shade themselves. Each bitmap symbol is associated with a map file that works a bit like a normal map for that building, so that the shading is determined by the 'global sun'. The end result is that I (as a CC3 user) don't have to worry about roof shading.

[Falconius]

Assuming it's a sharp roof you should probably actually use two different gradients split at the peak of the roof or just one gradient on the dark side. The shadow side of the peak should be immediately darker than the light side. Consider also that the light side will all be in full sun, as it is a flat plane. I don't actually think I'd use a gradient on the dark side either for the same reason, or at most a very subtle one. Flat planes tend to have the same reflection value across the entire thing.

[Redrobes]

I agree with Falconius and it was immediately obvious to me that the gradient of shadow on the roof was a little odd or that it was giving a depth map impression which may be desirable but its not accurate to the real world.

Since you asked, I either create the model in 3D using a 3D tool like Blender and get it to plot the shadow maps. More work up front but dead easy shadow. Or, I use my 2D program to plonk down stampped icons which are height maps and then convert the result into a 3D height map and then again get an app to generate the shadows for me. This second method is only better if you have a lot of similar buildings or trees or something similar. Or you have complex profiles to something you want to get accurate shadows for and still cant be bothered to model it in 3D. But either way, I dont generally hand do shadows.

BTW the texture for the roof of your icons looks really fine tho. I just dont know how you might rotate that and keep the shadows all pointing in the same direction.

[Aabra69]

Thanks for all the insight guys. I have a little but not much experience with Blender. I'm curious how you would use it though to plot shadow maps. I'd like to see what I can come up with.

[Southern Crane]

This looks like the process I ended up using for my current roofs in guild city map. Except I was using the gradient to simulate the curve of the roof shadows (sort of) and then using Filter>Renderer>Lighting Effects

I'm not completely happy yet with final results either. I've thrown realistic out the window so far and going for realism instead. Not an official terminology difference there but I remember it from some video game modding forum years ago where realistic was emulating real world while realism was more just representing it.

building-templates.png

[Gamerprinter]

I use vector, so applying a vector bevel can achieve the various shadowing effects of peaked roofs easily. Although you can change the source of light, and it's elevation using the bevel tools, I usually keep it in it's default settings. The advantage using vector is that if I rotate a given beveled shape, the light source stays the same, so the different levels of shading is maintained with light coming from the same direction. I then create a polygon of the shape of given slope on a roof, apply a Merge Layers transparency so the shadowing shows through the roof material. When I want to create a standard 2 sloped roof, I create a longer building, applying a bevel with bevels all sides - thus 4 sides on a rectangle, once created and rotated in the direction I want the building plan placed, I subtract the 2 short slopes to end up with a standard 2 slope roof. However, once I cut off the 2 beveled sides, it kind of destroys the integrity of the rotatable beveled shape, and cannot later rotate the building - as the light source is no longer built into the bevel. It's okay as long as I don't move the adjusted building.

Here's a recent area with a town map I created with these kinds of roofs.

GP

tarnish.jpg

[Falconius]

Did a thing:
CCI08017.jpg
Basically the principle is this: A flat plane will be a constant value which is determined by it's angle to the light source. A flat curve (not sure of the actual term) will darken according to the current angle of the surface to the light source, but be consistent along the parallel line.

This is ignoring both cast shadows (ie shadows formed by an obstacle in the path of the light) and reflected light (the light which hits nearby surfaces and bounces back into the shadowed area).

[Mouse]

And I can confirm that you are absolutely correct, because this is what CC3 makes of the situation with its normal maps

Roof angles.JPG

These are a set of towers I made myself. They use the CC3 version of 'normal' map to give the illusion of 3D shading. Because these images are mine I can upload them here, so here is one of the actual CC3 'normal' maps being used to generate the shading above. The visible texture of the roof in all four cases is the very same coloured bitmap. Its the shading created by 4 different normal maps that makes it look different.

Slate_blue_dome_01_MAP.png Slate_blue_dome_01.png

The programme reads the normal map to work out which way a piece of roof is facing, and how steeply angled it is.