ukgpublishing
First Post
Seems like an age since I last posted here. You know what its like, sometimes you have to force yourself, so here's me forcing myself in the hope of getting back in the habit.
Anyway, slaving away at the maps for HAAC:1 and I thought it would be nice to share some of the process with you guys and also a few tricks of the trade
Its been said in thse forums before that HAAC:1 is massive. Thats pretty much an understatement. The raw unformated manuscript is 114 pages long, thats without graphics, images, maps and all the other bits. The estimated page count of the finished product with mission briefings, character sheets, maps and battle tiles is going to be well over 300 pages.
Anyway the format of HAAC:1 unlike HAAC:0 which is one large mission, is a lot of small missions, rescue missions, eliminating enemy forces and these missions vary in scale and complexity.
Without wanting to give too much away here is the mapping process for Mission 2.
Mission 2 is a rescue mission, retrieving an American Doctor, his wife and kids from a beseiged hospital in the capital city. Much of the mapping therefore is exterior maps designed to look like aerial photos or recon images.
The maps for this are not battle tiles so I started by deciding the scale of the image (normally for battlemaps I use 100 pixels = 5 feet which prints nicely to 1 inch squares). For this I reduced the scale by a factor of 10.
I start with a blank canvas (transparent background, etc). I'm using layers a lot in this (for those who aren't familiar with graphic layers, think drawing on clear film and stacking images on top of one another).
The first layer, below is the building layer. I start with a roof texture (flat roof in this case) and build the edges onto the roof (careful selection allows me to add the drop shadows to add 3d quality). I draw the Helipad seperately, as well as the small roof top buildings and aircon vents. These where pasted into place and drop shadowed. The tanks were from stock imagery that I generated for other mapping projects. The entire building were drop shadowed to add 3d quality (the taller building has a much larger shadow that the smaller section with helipad). The porch sections where added using another layer beneath the building layer so the shadows fell over them.
With the buildings drawn I added a layer beneath that called ground, which surprise surprise, was for the carpark and grass cover. This starts off as a basic select and fill operation (using the feather function to blurr the boundaries between tarmac and grass. Then I add road and carpark markings. The fun bit with this was getting the latin phrase for "Ambulance Keep Clear" for the front of the Emergency section.
The next layer adds the vehicles and trees. Again I have a large library of these object pre-generated so it comes down to a matter of scaling and placing, plus drop shadows. This gives us the image below which is a nice clean map.
However one of the used I want this for is the mission briefing, which will simulate an aerial or satelitte image, sothe next layer which sits above all the others adds some cloud cover to the image.
Now these images are not normally in full technicolour, so changing the image to greyscale helps make it that bit more authentic.
I have another purpose for this map. The intel maps give in the briefing show the hospital pre-rising, and I want another image which shows the hospital when the party arrive.
Bring in another layer, add a Helicopter to the landing pad, a few more vehicles (some crashed), blood and a few torso's and we have the zombiefied map.
At this stage I was still a little unhappy with the grey image and decided to try pixelating it to add the low res intel image feel we often get in movies.
I'm not entirely sure which I prefer at this point, so any opinions would be valued
Anyway, thats just a brief look at some of the tricks I use for mapping and also a sneak peak at one of the mission maps for HAAC:1
Thanks
Anyway, slaving away at the maps for HAAC:1 and I thought it would be nice to share some of the process with you guys and also a few tricks of the trade
Its been said in thse forums before that HAAC:1 is massive. Thats pretty much an understatement. The raw unformated manuscript is 114 pages long, thats without graphics, images, maps and all the other bits. The estimated page count of the finished product with mission briefings, character sheets, maps and battle tiles is going to be well over 300 pages.
Anyway the format of HAAC:1 unlike HAAC:0 which is one large mission, is a lot of small missions, rescue missions, eliminating enemy forces and these missions vary in scale and complexity.
Without wanting to give too much away here is the mapping process for Mission 2.
Mission 2 is a rescue mission, retrieving an American Doctor, his wife and kids from a beseiged hospital in the capital city. Much of the mapping therefore is exterior maps designed to look like aerial photos or recon images.
The maps for this are not battle tiles so I started by deciding the scale of the image (normally for battlemaps I use 100 pixels = 5 feet which prints nicely to 1 inch squares). For this I reduced the scale by a factor of 10.
I start with a blank canvas (transparent background, etc). I'm using layers a lot in this (for those who aren't familiar with graphic layers, think drawing on clear film and stacking images on top of one another).
The first layer, below is the building layer. I start with a roof texture (flat roof in this case) and build the edges onto the roof (careful selection allows me to add the drop shadows to add 3d quality). I draw the Helipad seperately, as well as the small roof top buildings and aircon vents. These where pasted into place and drop shadowed. The tanks were from stock imagery that I generated for other mapping projects. The entire building were drop shadowed to add 3d quality (the taller building has a much larger shadow that the smaller section with helipad). The porch sections where added using another layer beneath the building layer so the shadows fell over them.
With the buildings drawn I added a layer beneath that called ground, which surprise surprise, was for the carpark and grass cover. This starts off as a basic select and fill operation (using the feather function to blurr the boundaries between tarmac and grass. Then I add road and carpark markings. The fun bit with this was getting the latin phrase for "Ambulance Keep Clear" for the front of the Emergency section.
The next layer adds the vehicles and trees. Again I have a large library of these object pre-generated so it comes down to a matter of scaling and placing, plus drop shadows. This gives us the image below which is a nice clean map.
However one of the used I want this for is the mission briefing, which will simulate an aerial or satelitte image, sothe next layer which sits above all the others adds some cloud cover to the image.
Now these images are not normally in full technicolour, so changing the image to greyscale helps make it that bit more authentic.
I have another purpose for this map. The intel maps give in the briefing show the hospital pre-rising, and I want another image which shows the hospital when the party arrive.
Bring in another layer, add a Helicopter to the landing pad, a few more vehicles (some crashed), blood and a few torso's and we have the zombiefied map.
At this stage I was still a little unhappy with the grey image and decided to try pixelating it to add the low res intel image feel we often get in movies.
I'm not entirely sure which I prefer at this point, so any opinions would be valued
Anyway, thats just a brief look at some of the tricks I use for mapping and also a sneak peak at one of the mission maps for HAAC:1
Thanks
