Shading, one of the most important parts of the map. Get this right, and your map is more than halfway on the way to success. Having correct shading is easy as 1.2.3 as long as you have the correct polygon placement. So in this tutorial I will go over both placement and shading itself. Ok lets get rolling.
1. Correct Placement The most key thing to remember is to never leave a vertice hanging. By this I mean that every vertice should be touching another one. I cannot emphasize this enough, however if you have done this I can pretty much end the placement tutorial here.
If you dont have connecting vertices, however, you will also notice a lot more polygon bugs/glitches because the soldat is liable to get caught in the skinny ends.
As you notice in the top figure showing the simplicity of the matter, I added a small polygon on top to get rid of the pointy edge. In the second figure I drew a random shape showing bad polygon placement. Notice, however each vertice was touching another. Now that we have mastered polygon placement lets continue on...
Now that we have mastered (hopefully) placing polygons its time to move on to the dreaded shading part of the map. Do not be afraid it sounds bad but its actually really easy, a lot easier than you thought. Its actually more coloring along the lines now, awesome eh? Anyway its up to you and your own experimentation to do different shading techniques but let me show you one that I use. Lets start by making a round figure.
Well as you noticed I added a little more than just a round figure to show you how to blend different ways of placing polygons. Notice how everything is neat and place well. If you look at my other tutorials for normal mapmaker, Walls and Circles you can notice the similarities I created. In fact if you place your polygons correctly these are the two ways which your polygons will appear, with variations of course. Anyway see that I have colored in the polygons brown, however your polygons can be green, IT DOESNT MATTER. First what we want to do is choose a darker base color. So since our base color is light brown, lets choose dark brown, and set the "Mode" setting to darken. This helps you to only darken and avoid lightening the polygons if the color you picked is actually a lighter shade than what you are shading.
Notice the opacity setting is set to 20, this will enable you to go over the parts where it is darkest and will save time from switching to different shades. Now select the VERTEX COLOUR TOOL
and go over the points which should be dark. Start from one side and make it to the next, going over spots two, three, four times which should be darkest. Make sure not only to get the points on the outside, but darken the point in the middle if you did the "circle" placement technique.
Oops did you accidentally make the top too dark? Just use this setting and go over the points on top to create a better contrast. Notice I change the "Mode" to lighten.
Congratulations, you are on your way to some nice shaded maps. Good Luck and experiment! *special thx to sml*
