I had a few questions about creating terrains and drawing shadows, to start, I am curious about what .grps exactly hold the terrain tiles? I know where to find doodads, but not sure what are the right files to modify if I want to change a basic tile.

Secondly, does anyone have tips for drawing a building's shadow? Any particularly effective, yet quick techniques? In the mod I'm working with, we have many buildings since there are about 7 factions all planned to have up to 11 buildings including turrets and supply structures a faction.

Any advice and help is appreciated.

The tiles are not contained within GRPs. They are in a collection of files that you can find under the "tileset\" directories in the MPQ. There are a bunch of files called <tilesetname>.cv5, <tilesetname>.vf4, etc that should be extracted to a directory, and then you can use a program like PyTILE to export the tiles and edit them. The file "tileset\<tilesetname>.grp" contains the graphics for the edges of the creep (but the actual creep tiles are part of the tileset). All of the "tileset\<tilesetname>\*.pcx" files are the various color palettes used on that tileset.

When creating a building shadow, I typically duplicate the building layer in Photoshop, fill it with a solid color and then skew it slightly. I don't really have a good suggestion for numbers, I just tend to go with what "looks right."

If you're making doodads, I recommend a lot of meticulous drop-shadow tooling, as seen in the video above.

If you're just making units or structures, you don't actually need to make the shadow. Find a shadow entry in images.dat and point it to the same grp as the unit's, setting the recolor to shadow.pcx. Then offset it appropriately in iscript.

@Pr0ngo, We'll work on that shadowing method you mentioned below sometime soon. If it works out, it will save me a ton of work. However, does it only work on sprites that replace sprites already in the game? For example, does it work on a Terran barracks redesign while not working on a completely new building that isn't replacing anything in the game?

Good tutorial about doodads.

@Voyager, where can I find that program? Is it somewhere on SEN?

Thanks for the help once again to both of you.

Post has been edited 1 time(s), last time on Jun 28 2017, 3:40 am by Augustus Valium.

It literally creates a copy of the grp, colored like every other shadow in the game, so yes. It works on every grp.

Python Modding Suite: https://github.com/poiuyqwert/PyMS

I recommend installing python 2.7 to make it work.