Need some Advise

[grundvarg]

Hello mapping is my LIfe well no but I love it.

Once more I have a massive project ahead of me and I need some advise to kick start me.

I am going to be making some terrain tiles for a Miniatures game I have written and am not certain how to make good outdoor battle map style maps.

Basically I am doing a massive grass plain and then separate pieces such as swamp, forest hill mountain etc.

Any help you be much appreciated.

Thank you well in advance for your time

[madcowchef]

You've come to the right place! Welcome to the guild. I'm a fan of battlemaps myself so I look forward to seeing what you have in mind.

[eViLe_eAgLe]

My only piece of advice right now would be to avoid long, large, stretching shadows on tile-able battle-maps, and to preferably make them lighting independent.
That's the main problem with tile-able overland battle-maps for me, they're not as impressive as Dungeon tiles or regular battle-maps due to the lack of proper lighting - of course this could be avoided by having all tiles only go a certain way, but that's not very good.

[grundvarg]

Well the actual game board is going to be grass lands- it is hex based the terrain tiles range in size from a full "flower of Hexes" to a single hex sized piece I'll post some of the test pieces here that I did several years ago.

What I need to find out is how to make the terrain from scratch.

here are some samples

ForestFlower.png

Steephill.png

[grundvarg]

Here Ill post a few items with explanations

LightForest.png

The above is the Black and white template for a light forest tile. it has the game jargon right on it.


Basic-Hill.png

the above is the play test color tile I did 2 years ago - I am not satisfied with it and want a more dynamic terrain. I basically was tweaking satellite images of the earth. I want to build the terrain from the ground up.

[grundvarg]

Oh and just for fun here is a couple of the Death Tokens I put together
DeathToknStained.png
DeathTokn001.png

[grundvarg]

Steephill.png


This one is more messed with than the other one

[madcowchef]

Are you looking for something that will tile relatively cleanly or are you going to rely on the printed borders to mark out boundaries? What's your end goal appearance wise satellite image like ore more representational?

[grundvarg]

What I want is to not use sat. images. The borders of the terrain tiles are inclusive they do not need to tile.

The actual Board will not need to tile ans, though it will be designed to be expandable there is no need for it to tile endlessly as I will be able to tie it together I am good with layering and the like in photo shop.

the board itself is going to be a basic grassland (without being boring to look at) and will measure about 30 inches square plus edge pieces. The Terrain tile are separate entities and do not rely on anything but their borders for separation from the base board, so players can arrange terrain differently each game.

I have seen beautiful work done on game maps (Battle mats and such ) on drive thru rpg and just need a push in the right direction on how to make map pieces like them

[madcowchef]

CGtextures is a great place to start for making work like the piece you've shown above.