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Making my own foundry maps
thunderbox13
Member Posts: 0 Arc User
I can't seem to be able to make my own foundry indoor maps, but yet I play foundry missions with indoor maps that I can't find in the pre-made map selection...
Help??
Help??
Post edited by thunderbox13 on
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We build them up in the sky on an outdoor map.
-Start with an outdoor map. I always use Meadow Clearing.
-Place one of the flat Building Block - Platform assets way up in the sky, like 500 units up. That's your floor. Sadly you're limited to just three texture styles for those. (Make sure to set everything you put down to Zero Altitude).
-Now go to the details tab and search for walls. You have a lot more options here. There are Starfleet, Klingon, Romulan, Cardassian and other generic walls. Set them to 501 units up. Put these down to get the corridor and room layout you want. Make sure to overlap as usually the short ends walls hang over the actual end of the wall part of the asset. If you're making a Starfleet interior, there are handy walls with opening doors or turbolifts.
-Now that you have your floor plan, you can populate it with consoles, other objects and NPCs. Some of these are better if you set them 1 higher than the Y value of the floor, some are better at .9 higher and some need higher or lower. You kind of have to experiment.
-Last of all put another platform asset on top of the floor. This will be your ceiling. I always use an identical asset to whatever I used on the floor, set anywhere from 6 to 10 higher than the floor, depending on how tall you want the ceiling to be and how tall the particular walls are.
Voila, custom interior. Some of us also use the black space around some of the existing interior maps. However be warned, Cryptic has a tendency to expand or contract these black areas without warning.
http://starbaseugc.com/index.php/trailers/essential-viewing/guide-creating-a-custom-interior-map/
"The time has come to see the world as it is." - Captain James T. Kirk
Twitter - @SDVargo
I didn't dabble with this sort of custom map building until I was on about my third mission. It's intimidating at first, but you can do some fantastic stuff with it. Here's a screen of my first effort: http://starbaseugc.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/08/senate.jpg
Word of advice, I built that map on the ground of the Meadow Clearing map. Don't do that unless you plan to utilize the ground part of the map too. Otherwise build up in the air.
HINT: use absolute zero. relative to terrain makes for an endless series of adjustments that get frustrating fast.
My character Tsin'xing
A lot can be done with buildings here. For the most part, I've stopped using many of those blocks. Using the tops of certain buildings can work as well.
"The time has come to see the world as it is." - Captain James T. Kirk
Twitter - @SDVargo
That's awesome.
High praise from the master.
- Above all set all your objects to use Zero Altitude. This saves you many headaches later.
- I build from the bottom up, since the Foundry displays newer objects on top of older ones.
- Always run through and check for gaps between the wall assets.
- If you get the flickering texture overlap, go back and set every other wall to be .001 offset. For instance if you have all the walls set to X = 30, put every other one as 30.001.
- Play around with different sky backdrops. Some of them can make some really cool lighting effects for your interior.
I'm sure some of other mad mapmakers have some more tips.
Building from the bottom up is a good suggestion. OP, you'll also find it incredibly frustrating if you put a ceiling on top before putting lots of details on the map. The icons for the platforms can cover everything.
Also, you really should learn how to manually edit the x y and z coordinates. See part 1 of my Back to Basics tutorial series at Starbase UGC.
My other recommendation is to use math whenever possible. For example, if you're lining up a bunch of walls, start with 2. Let's say you tinker with it and it looks like this:
wall 1: X: 300 Y: 300 Z: 300
wall 2: X: 300.001 (to avoid visible clipping) Y: 300.001* Z: 305.5
(*the player won't see the clipping on the Y, but it does affect performance, I think)
So, then you know to do the math for the Z of 3rd wall as 305.5 + 5.5 = 311. 4th wall is thus 311 + 5.5 = 316.5. That way you can put 10 walls down at once simply by using a calculator (if the math is harder that 5.5).
How did you do the catwalks to the side?
My character Tsin'xing
That looks like something from the Death Star.
Anyway, I second what thegreendragoon says - if one of the stock maps works well for your mission in functional terms, it's often easier to just redress it than to make a new map from scratch. In my upcoming mission "Valley of the Shadow I" I took a generic ship interior map and lined all the existing walls with brick-style foundation walls to make them look like underground tunnels and chambers. (I may even add piping to all the ceilings, in order to enhance the look even more.)
My Foundry missions | My STO Wiki page | My Twitter home page
It's made out of a bunch of Platform - Cardassian 01 arranged in a descending cascade with cube and ramp building blocks arranged to fill in the space underneath. There are four hallways leading off, each at a different vertical level. That's why the 3 different power conduits connect to the core at different heights. It was sort of an experiment in dealing with different vertical planes. The core itself is around a thousand meters in height.
One final word of advice. Successful map building in the Foundry is an exercise in taking existing assets and using them in ways there were never designed for.
It was already linked above, but if you check my sig there is another link to my tutorial on creating a custom interior. It has some basic tips to get you started.
Click here for my Foundry tutorial on Creating A Custom Interior Map.
Undine City: 1 2
I did enjoy myself when building the caves in "Depths of Nukara Prime"
it's maybe a bit work cause you have to hide the corners, but i think the result is nice
ok, here a little example how it could look:
http://imageshack.us/a/img809/5119/screenshot2013051001264.jpg
A foundry by commandermic
arcgames.com/en/forums#/discussion/comment/11723972
I love the idea of using this, hopefully they will get around to fixing my crash to desktop bug then i can use it !
good for you, when the idea of these platforms came across to me, i've already nearly finished this map - was much work to build this ground and hide all the corners when the whole map was there
and bad that so many authors still have problems to use the foundry...i've heard from someone that it has helped him when he created a new foundry character, but i don't know if this is working for others, too.
A foundry by commandermic
arcgames.com/en/forums#/discussion/comment/11723972
That looks surprising good. I would have never tried that with the rocks.
FYI, here is an interior built with buildings:
Less than 10 props used to make this room, if I recall.
http://starbaseugc.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/12/darkmap.jpg
Also, borg cube interior built in the sky on a ground map:
http://starbaseugc.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/09/cubey009.jpg
(more than 10 props on that one, lol)
looks very good,too :cool:
i always loved missions with custom interiors
A foundry by commandermic
arcgames.com/en/forums#/discussion/comment/11723972