I'd like to make ice caves out of the caveworks set. Print in black and white would work to a degree, but it would be better if I could shift the colors around somehow. Any suggestions. Someone mentioned a nice effect when their print ran out of a particular color of ink, is there any way to do that deliberately?

Importing it into a paint program and then colorizing it would probably do the trick....

All I have is Paint, and I'm guessing it won't do that. Any suggestions? I might have some basic photo editing software.

Just to see what would happen, I cut and paste a section of wall from Caveworks into MS photoeditor. Try changeing the image to a negative. You get this very eerie blue and white ice-cave looking thing. Only problem being it will print all the white space around the wall section as a solid black, which could eat up your ink supply.

You could also try downloading GIMP 2.0. A freeware program akin to Photoshop and PSP....

Depending on your printer type, remove all the colour from the cartridge except blue then print as normal and see what happens.

ICE Caves! Excellent idea.

You can download a FREE 30day trial of PhotoshopCS. (www.adobe.com)

30days ought to give you enough time to tweak the files to the icey effect s desired and save them.

-Floyd

Yes, I made this post. I don't know of a way to do this on purpose that makes sense with most printers. I did, however, find out that using the "reverse color" effect on Paint did result in the same as Carjack mentioned with PhotoShop. But, as he warned, you have to do something about the edges & white areas, which are now all black. I found the easiest thing to do was use the filled in rectangle tool with the color selected as white. Then you can go along the edges and get nice, even edges. In the tabs and doorways, you have to be more carefull,but it can be done.

For an extra touch, I randomly speard some glue around, and sprinkled silver glitter on the walls. I think this added some to the look, but it does "shed" abit. My son still has the Ice Caves set up; I think it is his favorite of the castles, wooden fortress, dungeon, etc. set ups I've made him.

If you need more help figuring out how to get paint to do this, let me know. If I went through the program I could explain it bettter, but it isn't really very hard. In fact, I've made some "reversed" images of other WWG stuff to that looks kind of interesting.

Ok, after about 1 minute in photoshop, here's a sample for you. I hope posting this is ok. I've only displayed a small portion of one wall.

I did a gradient map using a blue to white gradient. I'm sure I could tweak it to look better, and add some other color rather easily, but I figured I'd just post something for you to see. For those of you that actually have photoshop, I could probably record an action for you to do this.

Looks awesome....

I agree. Very cool. I'm going to have to look into doing that.

Heheh..."cool"

Yet more temptation for me to get CaveWorks...

WOW that is really cool! I have Photoshop but I've never used gradiant maps. Gonna have to look into it.

its image/adjustments/gradient map

I used a gradient map from a medium dark blue to white, but I set the white about 50% of the way across so there was plenty of white in the mix

Or you can follow a two step process in PS by doing the following:

Click: Image, Adjustments, Hue/Saturation
Place a check by "Colorize"
Hue: 182
Saturation: 36
Lightness: 0

Click: Image, Adjustments, Brightness/Contrast
Brightness: +4
Contrast: +36

And you get the following:



If you take a couple minutes you can turn that process into an action and go through the files pretty quickly for conversion. That’s how I would handle it anyway

Whoa! This is why you are the professional, Denny.

Denny, you should give classes in Photoshop! WOW I never knew that technique but it's powerful.

Thanks Denny, I had the colorize down... It was the Brightness/Contrast that was missing.... That makes all the difference in the world... BTW, Works the same way in Gimp....

Denny, ever thought of offering some "variants" on published sets? By tweaking the colors a bit, you could render a very different looking set for CWU, Village Works, etc. Not sure how you would want to market this: could be sold as an alternate within the published sets, or you could include instructions on how to tweak them, or as an aside, here on the web site. It really would expand the possibilities of each set, while not requiring a large time investment from you, and your staff.

The option of turning Cave Works into an ice cave, is really important. The classic Giant Series, from TSR of yesteryear, is still a powerful memory in thousands of minds. Just seeing the images is a major temptation to me, to purchase the set.

Years ago, at a convention, I played a BattleSystem game, set in the UnderDark realm. It was great fun, and I've been tempted to put together my own UnderDark mini's games, as a result. I also have the classic Giant Series of modules, from RPGNow.com. Seeing those images of ice caverns really struck a nerve in my DM's heart. Cheers!

Denny, you totally ROCK!!!!

That is really cool of you to help. I'm getting antsy already about updating CaveWorks to CoolWorks.

Thanks.

I agree the Ice Caves is an awsome. And an eligantly *simple solution to increase the usefullness of CaveWorks.

As much as I would love to see variations on a theme. I think I'd rather keep Denny's nose to the proverbial Grindstone as it were. And that is, creating these wondeful new sets for our miniatures/minds to explore.

Instead maybe we could (a this thread is an example of) start a Thread,Section that would be dedicated to this process. And Denny and all the Graphic Gurus could pop in and give their 2cents on various techniques to the process. Then these could be collected into a downloadable(PDF?) for easy reference.

I know I am all for it. Lord knows I've modified quite a few color schemes (to good effect) for various projects. And I love to see/explore other options that you all have come up with.

-Floyd

* - the variety of ways to approach a problem or idea is Photoshop is staggering. A testament to how incredibly powerfull a tool it can be. It allows for a very personalized technique to be achieved for the same problem.

Too funny! Guess why I'm wanting these ice caves? I'm running G2 right now! My players are gonna flip when they see these caves.

The color invert in Paint looks pretty cool, I may just start with that. Am I going to run into any trouble printing the copied image from Paint?

Are there graphics programs that work on the pdf directly?

That's for all the help, I'm a total newbie at this.

Instead of a thread, I think a section under WorldWorks User Resources called something like Kit Bashing would be a better idea.

I still like my previous suggestion ModWorks!

That is really cool. I was gonna suggest just messing with the colour balance but this looks like it works pretty well and it's simpler.

The image/adjustments menu is very powerful, and very useful

Just for fun, I used Denny's settings on shots I found from the front page:

Whoa ... Ice rules! (rules here used as a verb)

Yeah, these all look realy cool.

But imagine how great an actual WWG Ice Caves set would be!