Tarsis - lunaran.com

# Lunaran.com Matthew Breit Level Designer | Texture Artist

## DoW - Tarsis

#### Mar 01, 2006

The logical mapper progression is that after you do the desert map, you do the snowy map. This is the snowy map. Not quite content with Winter Assault's "muddy with a light snow coating" textures, I produced a much more antarctic style, complete with cracking ice floes that wound up looking arrestingly nice.

"Pity such a valuable world should be so inhospitable. And have such high tides." Tarsis takes place on a frigid mountaintop surrounded by equally frigid seas, ringed by treacherously thin sheets of ice. Requires the Winter Assault expansion.

I made 58 new decals and a new detail tile in a much more icy and wintry theme than the expansion's muddy slush. I was to discover, after doing all the work, that Relic did that because all of the game's explosion effects used dirt sprites and decals, which look really stupid and out of place on deep white snow (or worse, thin blue ice). Doh.

Having cut my teeth on Dawn of War's unconventional (to me at least) means of texturing with Coriolis, I was fully ready to exploit the system with this map. The tiling texture is merely an alpha-mapped shadow of windblown dunes, and most of the color showing through is from the underpaint layer. That let me color white or grey snow on the steppes, as well as shades of turquoise on the ice below to show areas where the ice was thick and light, or thin and dark. A layer of decals for frozen patterns of cracks mask the dune shadows on the ice. All decals are based on NASA satellite photos of ice sheets, deserts, and mountains.

This map is best for 3-6 player skirmishes or 3-6 player take and hold.

## Downloads

Documentation
Local Download (11.5MB)