Create Roofs in Dungeon Alchemist

How to create and edit roofs with Dungeon Alchemist and a Photo editing software.

Dungeon Alchemist doesn’t currently support levels and, because of that, it doesn’t have native roof tiles. So we are going to make our own with these simple steps.

Video Guide

If you prefer to watch a video, you can find it here:

• Images[imgur.com]
  
• JSON file[pastebin.com]
  
• Full Prefab creation guide
  
• Advanced Prefabs #1
  
• Advanced Prefabs #2
  
• Prefab credit to Baileywiki
  
• Music: Tabletop Audio[tabletopaudio.com]

Create the base image in Dungeon Alchemist

For more tips, tricks and guides, check out my VTT and game design blog:
Dungeon Dynamics[dungeondynamics.wordpress.com]

• Create a 1x1 Castle Hallway on a blank map.
  
• Click on Walls > Remove Walls and remove all 4 wall from the Castle Hallway “room”.
  
• Click on the Rooms tool > Edit Room > Select our single tile and click Edit Room Shape.
  
• Add as many tiles as you want your generic roof to be wide and tall as. We are doing a 9x6 roof in the example.
  
• Make sure you are using the same pixel size for the DA tiles and the Foundry grid squares to keep things consistent!
  
• Make sure to disable AI generation before resizing the room. Alternatively, remove the items placed by the AI in the Castle Hallway “room”.

• This is what your current room should look like.
  
• Switch to the Floor Tiles menu. We are going to use some visual trickery to simulate a 3d roof. Dungeon Alchemist comes with a lot of repeated tiles that are brighter/darker variations of the same pattern.
  
• In this example, we are going to replace the tiles in the upper and lower halves with “City pavers dark green” and “City pavers light green” resspectively.

• The room is now a roof covered in shingles!
  
• Export the “map” with Ortographic (top down) Perspective and with an Image Quality matching the pixel size of your Foundry grid squares. Set the grid to Off.

Photo Editing steps

• Open the image in your favorite photo editor.
  
• We have exported the image at 150 pixels per tile, so with a 9×6 size, our roof is precisely 1350×900 pixels in size.
  
• We are going to resize the canvas so that it is exaclty the same size of our roof. This will crop out the background and leave the “roof” by itself.
  
• It is nice to have the roof overextend over a building by a little bit. We are going to increase the canvas size to add some empty space along the border of our image. Half a square is a good measure so, in our case, we have increased the canvas size by 150 pixels to 1450×1050.
  
• Double click our “Background” layer in the “Layers” sidebar and turn it into a Level.
  
• Select the Magic Wand tool, click on the white space around the roof and press Delete.

• Our roof with an empty margin around.

Optional: better looking roofs.

These steps are not fundamental, but they’ll improve the overall look of our roof.

• Turn on the Grid and set it to 25 pixels. In Photoshop, this is under Edit > Preferences > Guides, Grid and Slices. Press Crtl+, to visualize the Grid.
  
• Alternatively, you can eyeball it. Roofs are not always that precise anyway!
  
• Select the Polygonal Lazo tool and remove two triangles on each side of the roof. The size of these triangles will make the roof look more or less steep.

• A steeper roof keeps the snow at bay.
  
• If green roofs are not your thing, clikc the Image menu > Adjustments > Hue/Saturation. Play around with the Hue value until you get a color your like.

• We opted for red/maroon shingles. Classic!
  
• Save your image in a format that supports transparency, like .png or .webp.
  
• It is a good idea to save the roof twice: once horizontal, once vertical (you can rotate the image and save it again). This is cause rotating tiles in Foundry is a bit of a headache sometimes.

I want even better looking roofs!

The video has a few additional optional steps to add more decorative elements to the roof, including a chimney, leveraging assets from Dungeon Alchemist.

Foundry usage

There was a tutorial here once, but roofs are now natively supported by Foundry, so you don’t need Level/Better Roofs anymore. Simply place your roof on top of the building it was designed for and have fun!