Ok I'm trying to make it so my terrian looks evil, like your entering a very horrible place. I think that part works but I think i did really bad at the rest of it. Its suppost to be natural with alot of dead people and lots o fire. Its for a hero picker.... Tell me what you think about it..!
Edit: Added Sky, lots of enviromental dodads (some on fire) and a new picking place (3 altogether) Reason why I asked about the ramp is because I'm trying to make it so you can go on a hill by a stairset.
I think it sucks at least what you gave us in the form of pictures.
1. DO NOT use the cliffs. They always look crappy and often enough there are cracks in the map that show the sky below.
2. Set the sky to fogged sky - always a good place to start.
3. if this is for a game then give us the game camera angle.
4. Pick and choose your doodads carefully. Seriously it looks like you just grabbed and plopped without rhyme or reason here.
Now for some general rules of thumb.
1. No building be it a unit or a doodad in the default game set is scaled to anything like reality - place a standing unit like Kael in front of your building, does he have to get on his hands and knees to walk into the building? If that is what it looks like then you need to go to the object editor and increase not only the max scale but also the min scale and the default scale.
For your windmill (as example) should have a scale of 1.8 across the board. Give it the pathing of the castle if you want to - I personally like to use pathing blockers to build a more realistic path around my doodad models.
2. Never ever ever remove the boundaries or scale them to the edge of the map That shadow is there for a reason, to hide the fact that the world is very small. By all means increase the size of your map by another 32 (play with it around all 4 sides) and then use that shadow area to plop trees, rocks, something that will hide the end of the world.
3. When ever you start off making a map you should set its cliff height to 3, and use random variation across the whole map - this will give you "natural" lumps and humps and bumps to start off with. It is far, far easier to come back with the plateau tool and flatten terrain for buildings than it is to randomize the landscape on a flat map.
---> Ideally one should "rough in" their map meaning lay in rough textures, raise up hills, lower your valleys, place in water then use advanced Reset height field to randomize and smooth the landscape a tad.
Now my next question is, are those rock chunks the default rock chunk destructibles? If yes then they will be selectable and attackable in the game. I make a copy of rock chunks and set its classification as ramp or something else. I also make it available on all maps, and I also adjust the scaling and even tint. This gives me two forms - permanent rock chunks that can not be attacked and rock chunks that can be attacked.
You want evil? Fine let me tell you how to make this map "evil".
Set a fog to a light grey Via options: Set z start at 30 set Z end at 8000 set its density to 0.5. Save - now hit F on your key board - you will have a nice density of fog that is distant and close enough to set a "mood" for your map. If you want it thicker or denser then go back and fiddle. Go ahead and customize the color if you want to - the setting I gave you is good for atmospherics across many skies and landscapes.
Set the sky to fogged sky - it looks nice with the fog no matter what time of day.
In your triggers set the time of day to something like 1.00 then turn off the day night cycle - you will have perpetual night making everything dark and "evil".
In your editor set the tie of day to midnight. Once you have all that set you can go back and tinker with the shade and density of the fog. The idea your aiming for is something dark and gloomy. Start off with a gray base fog, then lower or raise all three colors to get the right darkness, you can raise or lower different colors slightly to shade the fog just a little - say having green 10 higher over blue and red will give a very slight greenish tint to your fog. Green is evil - right?
Doodads.
Work on the tinting off all of them - strike for a certain color - say green - and aim to make all of the doodads slightly greener and darker to go along with the greenish fog. Darker usually means ruins. I can take cityscape bright white structures like the walls and arches and make them look creepy and "evil" by darkening them a bit and making them slightly green (very slight).
Kill your trees - using one tile of blight next to a tree will kill it - it will turn greyish dead - looks better than a bright green "I'm-so-happy-to-be-alive-in-this-evil-place" kind of tree.
So is that fire just for looks or does it burn?
Want burning fire? Then take your Peon unit, copy it and past it as a customized unit. Change its name to fire - remove its movement or reduce its movement to something fantastically low. Remove its abilities maybe add a version of tornado aura ability (which attacks or damages buildings).
Change its model file to fire - Place it in your editor, assign it player Neutral Hostile. When your units walk near it the fire will "attack" and cause damage.
Make a couple of copies of this unit - scale one down and scale another up. raise the attack damage of the larger, lower the attack damage of the smaller - now place in groups of 3 to 5 - add the cinematic fire here and there - now you have an area of fire that can attack and do damage and fire that is only there for looks.
If you have the unit with a very slow movement, add wander to it - now its even more dangerous and will slowly move about - fire with not only bite but a little more life to it.
Those fences are way out of play - and some of them are hanging in the air. Select one of them, now hit CTRL + Shift + ~ at the same time - you will select all of the fences of a kind - now hold down CTRL and hit Page Down - all of the fences that are selected will lower into the ground.
Seriously there are many posts in this forum that go over these same details over and over again. Go and read and then apply as needed to your map then come and post pictures.
