Best way for Building Roofs?

[Gamerprinter]

A fun one to create is the onion domes as found on Orthodox Eastern Churches, and Islamic mosques. I used a 3D program to create those for a past map, to really get the shadowing correct. One of my first map challenges used these kind of roof domes.

[Mouse]

LOL! I think working out the normal map to do something like that in CC3 would be possible, but it would take someone like me a really long time (and a very big headache).

The normal maps I've made so far for the towers I already have are fountain-filled vector shapes drawn in CorelDraw 11, which is totally ancient. Its ability to do fountain fills is limited to a set of relatively fixed shapes, so I would have to break up an onion dome of that kind into quite a lot of separate pieces and work out the fill for each piece individually. The more I think about it, the more pieces I have to add to the total sum. I'm already at about 100.

[Southern Crane]

Did a thing:
Attachment 92406
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).

This is awesome Falconius, cheers! I am going to start trying to implement this on this type of subtle level.

[Aabra69]

Wow there is some fantastic information in this thread now. Thanks so much everyone! Keep it coming if you have any additional tips. This is really useful.

[Hussar]

Sorry if this question is answered elsewhere, but, I'm kinda failing my Google-Fu.

I would like to make flat topped buildings, rather than have the sort of standard peaked roof maps that you typically see. I'm creating a Dungeons and Dragons campaign set in the Bronze Age and the buildings should look a lot more Mediterranean than what I can typically find.

Is there somewhere out there with a bunch of pre-created buildings that I can plunk down to build maps? I'm mostly interested in designing battle maps for the game, to be honest. And it's kinda jarring when every map I plunk down has these faux-Medieval buildings on them.

[Mouse]

Campaign Cartographer 3 Plus has a range of flat-roofed buildings in its City Designer 3 add on, and there are additional symbol sets that you can use in CC3+ to expand your collection - both CC3+ and third party contributions.

Dundjinni and Fractal Mapper 8 may also have suitable sets and facilities, though I can't say for sure since I only have CC3+

Here is a small extract of a CC3+ map I am currently working on showing some of the flat roofed buildings in the CC3+ set (I have used sheet effects in this example to alter the colour of the buildings to suit the map)

Flat roof extract.jpg

Be aware, however, that CC3+ is a vector program, rather than a paint type programme like GIMP or PS, and there may be a relatively steep learning curve involved before you can rattle of battle maps at the rate of 1 an hour (as some of the more adept users have been known to do)

[Syrkres]

Is there a tutorial about for creating roofs for mapping tows/cities/etc? This is something I would love to see.