The cold season is here again, at least in the northern hemisphere, and white stuff is falling down outside my window.

There are a couple of nice styles for making winter maps, such as Winter Trail and Winter Village, but what if you just want to make your overland map look a bit more seasonal?

One of my favorite effects is the RGB Matrix Process. This effects may look a bit complicated if you just look at the dialog, but this is just all about simple mathematical manipulation of the color values. Using this dialog you can strengthen or weaken an individual color component, such as adding more red or less green. You can even completely swap color components around, for example swapping the red and blue components. CC3+ has other ways of manipulating colors too, but none of the other effects can accomplish the same as the RGB Matrix process can.

I’ve already explained the effect in another article a few years back, The RGB Matrix Process Effect, so today I’ll just use it to show you how to give a quick makeover to an existing map, you can read more about the calculations in the linked article.

To start out, I simply loaded up the example map from the CC3+ user manual. You can find this at @Tutorials\UserManual\Example.fcw

This is a map in the familiar Mike Schley Overland style, showing what looks mostly like a summer view of the location. Let us see what we can do with it.

I’ll start with the LAND sheet and add the RGB Matrix Effect to that sheet to turn the land background white-ish. Note that you usually want to put this effect at the top of the effects list for each sheet, as you want colors processed before you do other effects like edge fades. Now, when we wish to use this effect to make things white, we generally want to balance out the colors a bit to soften the extremes, then add a bit to make it white, but we also need to be careful to avoid simply washing it out and loosing the details. This can take a bit of experimentation, but generally, half the value of each color component should come from itself, and the other half from the sum of the other two, then tweak it until you are happy. For example, in my screenshot, you can see that the red (R) component is made up from 0.7 times itself + 0.3 times green + 0.3 times blue + a flat addition of 0.1. Green and Blue is constructed similarly. As you may notice, the sum of the components for each (R = 0.7 + 0.3 + 0.3 + 0.1 = 1.4) is larger than 1, meaning it will end up brighter. Since we did this to all three color components, that will result in a more white-ish color overall.

I also reduced green a tiny bit because this texture is mainly green, and if I don’t reduce it, it looks more like a thinner layer of snow where the green pokes through. The result looks like this

Notice how the texture of the fill is still preserved. Now, let us quickly do the LAND FEATURES sheet using the same values as above:

Again, this leaves the textures of the fields very nice and visible, while turning them white. But now for the symbols. Since this is just a quick demo, I’ll just leave them on the sheets they are on and let them all be affected, but you may want to consider move symbols to another sheet to avoid them getting affected.

However, there is one issue with how symbols are processed that prevents certain effects working on them. The main reason for this is that some effects, like edge fades, causes very strange results with partially transparent symbols. However, it is possible to tell CC3+ to allow us to affect symbols with effects. Simply type in the command DELAYDRAWSYM on the CC3+ command line and hit enter. The command line will now prompt for the value 0 or 1 to indicate disabled or enabled. You’ll want to disable the behavior, so type 0 and hit enter again. You won’t see any immediate change unless you have already tried to add effects to your symbols, but if you did this correctly, you’ll find that you can now make your hills white in the next step. Note that this command is a session-based command, so it will stay this way until you close CC3+. It will also be reset the next time you start CC3+.

Now, let us add effects to the symbols. First the SYMBOL sheet. I opted for a slightly different calculation here by only manipulating each color channel without mixing them:

Then the SYMBOLS TREES sheet, very similar, but I reduced the green component a bit. Notice that the trees are still pretty green, but I decided the map needed to break up the snow a bit, so this settings make the tree appear colder (pushing them a bit more towards blue) and thus more appropriate for winter, but without making them white.And as a final change, I also used the Colorize effect on the text sheet to turn the white text black, and switched to a light brown outer glow, since white text on snow doesn’t work too well. I also use the RGB Matrix on the ocean to make it a bit cooler blue. In the end, this is what the map look like, and all that was required was a few minutes to add a few effects.

If you have questions regarding the content of this article, please use the ProFantasy forums. It can take a long time before comments on the blog gets noticed, especially for older articles. The forums on the other hand, I frequent daily.