Nov/Dec/Jan '23 Lite Challenge: Seeing the Red mist...

[Redrobes]

Nice to see you around again Storm.

Some of my rooms are busy with 6 chairs each with foot stool and chest but that is 30x20 so its not so bad. But whats with the 32 gold dishes on the table - who is that for ? That's some party they are throwing. Can you imagine the PCs saying yeah we will have those like some fork lift hauling out piles and piles of this stuff. Encumberance would be a huge deal in this module.

I have done a little work on it today and grabbed some textures, made them seamless in the usual manner and then started to texture up the room floors. Its pretty garish this one but that's what it says in the description.

I will upload these wips at half size and the final at full size. Each one is quite large and takes about 7Mb otherwise.

### Latest WIP ###

[Bogie]

Looking good, nice wall shadowing. Those are some intense colors!

[Redrobes]

I have not played ToEE module before and its clearly one of the oldest and original dungeons. It seems quite harsh with the write up. Such as opening a particular door takes 3 consecutive knock spells - as if any party would try twice more after casting one. It would seem that players are going to take a lot of mandatory damage without fault which is quite annoying as a PC.

So I seem to have the water section and from reading a few other peoples areas they seem to have the other elements to deal with.

This area is not under water but fashioned by craft and magic to look as though it is so there is a lot of blues and greens everywhere and I expect to see other peoples maps in reds and other strong colours as per the description. I had no idea what serpentine looks like and the web shows a variety of examples all looking pretty different but all blues and greens. So I have tried to find textures which can be colour adjusted to make it look right. Most of them are stone of some kind where I make a seamless tile of texture and then paste a couple of layers down with different scales - I try to make the scales a prime number so it rarely realigns showing its repeating pattern.

Its clear that this area has been fashioned using a lot of magic so I have kept to the grid lines exactly and also put in some lights along the corridors otherwise technically they would all look black and not very interesting. I put in some glow but there is some more yet to come. There is a blue glow from the pool when I put that in and there are some green glowing spheres in the rooms either side of the main areas. So it is an intense colour map. I think the module writers definitely let themselves go a bit on this one.

[Redrobes]

I needed to add the fountain and pool and I probably could have done it in 2D but I do like to think that the shapes I am putting in could be correct so I made it in 3D. Again blender is the tool of choice but I have been using OpenSCAD (https://openscad.org/) which is free for making 3D objects for 3D printers. So it outputs in STL format.

It turns out that you can just use MeshLab to convert these to OBJ format which is my format of choice for my tools. You can call it on the command like like:

meshlabserver -i shape.stl -o shape.obj

Then I can load that into a tool and render out a height map of it. Then using that height map I can turn that back into the greyscales needed to drive the texture engine again and carry on with the map. Not sure this is a great way of doing it but it works for me.

So I have added the fountain of four bowls which overflowing into each other. I still need that big fish head feeding the top bowl but I can do that in another object.

The pool at the bottom glows and radiates blue. Theres some gold, jewels and coins in some of these but I have not done that yet.

[Redrobes]

And the latest map based on that bit of effort...

### Latest WIP ###

[Bogie]

The fountain is cool!

[Redrobes]

The fountain is cool!

Thanks its a representation of:

a tiered series of 4 basins. The fourth and largest never overflows, so it must have a drain system somewhere.

and has some kind of fish with a head which is feeding the top tier.

the code for this is for this OpenSCAD and I can post it because its not too difficult a program to use. So paste this into the text area and press F5 to see the 3D model. You make one basin and then call that function 4 times with different translations, rotations and scaling to make this tiered set. Really its just playing with the model and keep looking at the 3D window to see what it looks like, adjusting the numbers until its about what you had in mind.

$fn = 90;

module Basin()
{
	scale([1,1,0.5])
	{
		rotate_extrude()
		{
			union()
			{
				difference()
				{
					circle(500);
					translate([-2000,-1000]) square(2000,2000);
					translate([0,1020]) circle(1000);
				}
				translate([470,120,0]) circle(50);
			}
		}
	}
}

module BasinSpout()
{
	difference()
	{
		Basin();
		translate([0,-200,300]) rotate([120,0,0]) cylinder(500,100,100);
	}
}

module Fountain()
{
	scale([40,40,40]) Basin();
	translate([0,20000,5000]) scale([32,32,32]) BasinSpout();
	translate([-14000,30000,10000]) rotate([0,0,50]) scale([25,25,25]) BasinSpout();
	translate([-25000,30000,14000]) rotate([0,0,100]) scale([20,20,20]) BasinSpout();
}

module Scene()
{
	Fountain();
}

Scene();

[Redrobes]

I found a public domain picture of a fish head on the USGS website (yay once more for them !). I found a free gargoyle on free3d and converted it and rendered it out with a stone texture. The plinth they sit on are supposed to be triangular and mine are but because their wings extend beyond the walls I made the plinth angle forwards so that they are sitting out from the walls a bit. I added some normal doors and the stairs bottom left.

The fish is supposed to be bronze with verdigiris. Do you think it works ? It looks a bit orange and bold but then again a big fish head sticking out of the wall would !

### Latest WIP ###

[Falconius]

The fish looks like it's blowing bubbles, which is kinda cool. As for the colour, I wouldn't be surprised if the people who built with garish colours also painted the fish to look like its natural colours, but according to the quote it would be a very matte somewhat unsaturated green or green/blue.

[Edward Tait]

I really like the fountain and overall it works and gets the point across