How did they do it?

[Marcus777]

I am trying to figure out how they put doodads so it gives 3d look. I know about alpha tileset, but I haven't figured out how they did this. I posted pictures below of what I mean. See how some doodads below others or some are above.

Also, in case someone can help me, I created alpha tileset according to the tutorial, but it's black every time I do it. What if I want it to be something else? Like I am trying to create arena in the sky like in picture #3. Do I create alpha tileset and then just put something on top of it to cover the blackness? Any help would be greatly appreciated.

 

[~Void~]

Scale and proportion.

Once you get the alpha tiles to work, you basically just create a bunch of doodads, scale 'em up, and sink them way below the terrain.

Images 2-4 look like they're built using walkable doodads as terrain. That can be glitchy, but it seems to work. I'd advocate for the former approach.

 

[tillinghast]

just control+pagedown until they're far below the alpha tile?

 

[~Void~]

Yup, exactly.

 

[Marcus777]

Scale and proportion.

Once you get the alpha tiles to work, you basically just create a bunch of doodads, scale 'em up, and sink them way below the terrain.

Images 2-4 look like they're built using walkable doodads as terrain. That can be glitchy, but it seems to work. I'd advocate for the former approach.

Ah, I see. So if I want an object to appear to be below the terrain/alpha tileset, I need to make them smaller? And the ones above to be bigger, right? Thank you! For image 4, I really like how they did it, so I will research more about walkable doodads.

 

[~Void~]

I think the XYZ grid and one-point perspective camera inherent to the game engine should solve that for you.

Exaggerating scale is risky business. Not to say it can't be a great approach - it probably just takes a lot more work than simply lowering an object down really far. But I'd try it and see what works best for you.

 

[ColourWolfe]

Alpha tile is as easy as painting a portion of the map you want to have "depth".
Then it's only a matter of placing doodads in such a way that it gives the illusion of depth.

It's much easier to explain in an example, so here's how I used the almighty Alpha tile to give the illusion of water reflection on a lake in my project.



The lake has doodads "reflecting" on it, the trees, cattails and the mountain. However, that's all a lie. Because once we remove the water plane from the picture, you can see that I have another set of doodads rotated around, and what I did was "sink" them into ground. You can change the vertical position of doodads by hitting CTRL + Page Up/Page Down on your keyboard. To rotate doodads around, find the Art - Maximum Pitch Angle (degrees) and change the value. Here I used -90 (hold shift when clicking on the field to allow you to go negative values).

And that's it! Here's a non-overview angle of this, with and without water, but more zoomed in.



The thing about Alpha tile is that you HAVE to make walkable terrain first, and then paint it, or you can literally lose your mind trying to fix it up. Which means, if you want to make a bridge over a very deep mountain gorge, you would terrain it first by making areas you want walkable, and then lower the surrounding terrain down as much as you'd like. THEN apply the alpha tile to "erase" terrain, and place bridge doodad(s) on top of it. Now you have a bridge suspended in air. Now it's just a matter of placing doodads, and using the above mentioned shift + page down to "sink" them into ground, to give the illusion of depth of field, such as water flowing bellow the bridge, small trees (use common sense, things look smaller the further away), rocks, etc.

Hope this helps man, happy terraining!