Evil's truly evil guide to building the maps of the most vile sickest loathing hole that is known to the PW community known as the UD

1) Lore: First of all, read, read, read about the UD. Get your hands on the material.

Menzo box set any way you can. Sometimes the smallest crappy 2nd edition or 3.0 3.5 sketch or image can inspired a mountain out of your creativity. If you think not, I build Sschindlylyrn off of a lame sketch I found from a 1st edition image. As well as this other image of while I was working on Szith-Morcane.





2) Research the community: Chat with many people that are familiar with the topic. Everyone including me thinks we are UD gurus but honestly there is just way to much information and sadly TSR and Wizard didn't make a perfect hand off of information in their sloppy transition of business. But yes, get with a couple of lore masters. Despite what anyone claims, one person isn't enough. I still learn much about the UD - daily.

3) Basics: Prior to even opening up the toolset, download "Don't Panick: Hitchhiker's Guide to the NWN2 toolset", it isn't a be all end all guide to the toolset, but it is a great primer for learning. It will at least teach you the basics, like how to rotate the camera around.


4) Plugins: Obtain "The Grinning Fool's Usability Tools Plugin"

5) Mood: Get a very dark play list of music. My recommendations Slipknot, King Diamond, Lemmy Motorhead, Type of Negative, to help set your mood. Different aspects of the UD call for different themes and structures. Again sometimes what you are doing is more grundier than other things.







6) Server Mod: If/When you get your hands on the server's mod get familiar with all of the placeables. Reason being is I utilize many of them for many different things. I have shown this trick to a few others that see me actually map. I will take a lamp and turn it into a huge structure, or mix it into other objects. I hate hate hate stock items and placeables. Most of this map was map out of NON building placeables.



7) Resize: for the UD races, almost everything will need to have their Z size shrunk. The best bet is to plot on a drow to compare, or a duergar, or even more so a svirfneblin. People who don't find out later that they really wished that they would have when they go to sit down at a table and it is taller then their character.


Lighting - Lighting: is a big topic. There is like the other all map lighting and then there is spot lighting. I am trying to use really basic terms here, but in a nut shell what you will want to do is select the map's properties and go into the default setting for the UD.

My view has always been that those without dark vision or low light vision need to be honestly blind as mole. Some might argue that the same should be verses those of the UD races, but they have light blindess for 1 round and suffer -1 on everything else while in light areas. The bad part that irks me is, if human A comes down in the UD, they have no penalties.


On ground, sky, sun/moon light intensity I use 0.

bloom intensity I use .08.

Fog color use jet black.

Set area to always night so appropriate critters do not get sunlight penalty

In skydome type FX_Skydome_Black

***WARNING**** Avoid making maps looks like they are from the movie Saturday Night Fever:
Example -

More so, pose this question to yourself. Will your map make John Travolta dance like in Greese or Saturday Night Fever, or will it make him want to act like in the movie, "From Paris with Love"? If you have a kaleidoscope of light in every tile or footing of map, you probably have to much lighting going on.




9) Sound: Two sites that are good are freesound.org and soundation.com. Free sound is an ope source community of sharing sounds that you might use. soundation.com is where you can actually create music/beats/and other sound effects. We'll delve more into this topic as time progresses.

10) Scripting: click NWN2 Scripting

Wow
Big thanks for the guide EVIL going to have see if i can have a gander at making something at somepoint
Really big thanks for all your work on the UD maps too they are reaaaly good

Haha looks like some true inspiration

Great ideas from a very creative builder I'm drinking your words master! =)

I think maybe I am scared and not wish look inside Evils brain!

Over the time I will be adding to my original post and editing it.