I'm trying to recreate
Waterdeep and Undermountain in the DnD Forgotten
Realms, and it is in early
stages. The true purpose of this is to help me
study "the ultimate dungeon" to create my own
asset kits and learn from it, for help in making
my big project #NotSSgame better.
I'm using Blender for modeling and scaling
the maps. google and some DnD books for getting
the map .pngs. convertio online for converting
black and white pngs into svgs, which I can
easily convert to height maps to get a starting
point. I went through each map and hand-painted
out all the doors, shores, text, etc. to prepare
these svgs.
I've been working hard on this the 5 days or
so, once it finally clicked that this is the
project I really want to do regarding Waterdeep,
which I've been fascinated with ever since Eye
of the Beholder on SNES. about 70 hours. I can
work for LONG hours if I have good DnD
playlists. Right now I'm on episode 14 of
Gnomes, Tomes, and Catacombs on Destiny's
channel, but after that I'll need another good
series.
I've spent about 70 hours on it so far,
spread over a week or so. My current plan
with this project, though I am slow at working,
is to release it as a Unity app for free on
itch.io under the name Project Ultradeep. It
allow for a first-person view of areas, but it
would be easy to add an overhead camera as well.
and my dream is to put it into Oculus Quest, and
eventually maybe as a custom level in VR chat
for people to explore in VR together. and
there'd at minimum be a little pop up menu/map
so you could teleport to various areas as
desired.
For now I'm planning for all the
rooms to be really barren except for accurate
shapes and custom textures, with proper
interconnection bits added between levels, and
little bit more metroidvania style interlocking
to make it less linear in progression (figuring
out how to shape The Beltram Shaft is a doozy
with the current layout), and have the text of
each map key show up as hovering text in each
room, facing you no matter which direction you
look at it from. There would be
spooky/appropriate lighting throughout. Then in
another phase I would like to go through and
actually 3d model all the elements in each room,
but that's a tall Asset order that would take
awhile but would go faster once I compile a list
of objects.
For now I'm planning to add
little 2d cardboard cutouts of monsters and NPCs
around, then eventually model them if I ever
can. I'm also working on modeling the DnD
bestiary, but that's another really long-term
project I've only scratched the surface on.
Right now I am studying the great models by
mz4250.
The Waterdeep city area is
secondary to getting the Undermountain modeled,
and I want it to be in a definitive way - a way
that models and includes all the big campaign
areas people care about from the past. for
example, Xanathar's Guild from Eye of the
Beholder, The Elder Eye Pit of Ghaunathar, the
Mad Mage's areas, and the Shaft from Expedition
to Undermountain, including Spiderhaven, et al.
Below I made a 52-minute youtube dev
video showing off some of the ideas and process
for Project Ultradeep:
When it's available to try,
I want lots of feedback about the map accuracy
and layout, the campaigns I should be sure to
include areas from, and ANYTHING else I should
keep in mind. and desired features for me to
consider. This is another slow long-term side
project, and one of many side projects I jump
around between.
The current state is
that I have all areas (I think?) to scale and
laid out as their original 2d maps, and I've
meticulously turned each map into a black and
white svg image I can import for each area and
instantly turn into a 3d height map. once all
those 3d height maps are in to scale and
connected between levels, I'll start going
through and reading the relevant documents to
figure out the "mood" of each area including its
lighting and color schemes, and compiling lists
of "area textures" to create.
I tend to
work really hard on things for a week then shift
to something else. What keeps me in the mood to
work on this is having good DnD youtube campaign
playlists to watch. Right now I'm watching
Gnomes, Tomes, and Catacombs with Destiny, etc.,
and if anyone links me more good playlists (with
chill people who aren't loud obnoxious tryhard
theatre kids) that will help me immensely to
work and stay in the mood. getting feedback
helps me a lot too to make sure I'm going the
right direction and making something useful. I
guess that would be on my twitter.
