City Walls in Photoshop

[kittrellbj]

I looked around the forums for a tutorial that specifically covered city walls in Photoshop, but I couldn't find one. There may be one, but I did look for a while and could not find one.

So, I made one after toying around in Photoshop for a while.

Here it is.

P.S. You could easily build freeform castles with this, as well. Just whatever needs a wall.

[Coyotemax]

Sweet! I'll test this out when I'm done the current project! I've never done a city map before.

[Steel General]

Looks pretty cool.

[Gandwarf]

Tutorials are very welcome, thanks!

[Rogueleader89]

interesting wall technique, looks nice and much simpler to do than my current method, definitely will make use of it on some of my town maps.

[Coyotemax]

Well, as promised, I tested it out.

And then, true to form, i tweaked it around a little.

I was considering moving my city map up a few years (the original version shows it at a period where the stone walls are just being started), and this was the perfect excuse to try your tutorial out.

I can't say i would have reached this look without trying this out, thanks for the inspiration!

[Bobzilla]

Well, as promised, I tested it out.

And then, true to form, i tweaked it around a little.

I was considering moving my city map up a few years (the original version shows it at a period where the stone walls are just being started), and this was the perfect excuse to try your tutorial out.

I can't say i would have reached this look without trying this out, thanks for the inspiration!

*yoink*

oh wait...what did you tweak to get it like that?

[Coyotemax]

It's mostly changing around the bevel, and a tossup between stroke and glow, and my own happy stone texture (defined pattern) mixed in.

lemme load up the effects and i'll see what I got.

For this particular scale (1px=1') I initially used a 35 hard round brush for the initial steps on the wall, but later I just stayed with the 18 hard round, since I didn't think it would need any extra smoothing/select-modify-shrink because of the relatively straight wall lines. The towers are at 35, still. (I realize this may be a little larger than a real city wall, but anything smaller didn't look right).

I did the ctrl-select and shrunk the selection by 3 to get the inner layer on the walls and towers, the gatehouses didn't look right so I modified those selections by 5.

The bottom wall layer got..
Drop Shadow: Multiply, Opacity 100%, Global light angle (on my map is -45), Distance 5, spread 0, size 10
Bevel/Emboss: Inner bevel, chisel hard, depth 60%, size 0 soften 0, global light, everything else default
Contour: range 30%, default slope
Texture: my rock pattern, scale 10% depth 50%
Pattern overlay: My rock pattern, opacity 100%, scale 10%

Top wall layer...
Inner Glow: Normal, Opacity 100%, Colour dark grey 232323, size 4
Pattern overlay: My rock pattern, opacity 100%, scale 10%
Stroke: inside, size 1, dark grey 232323 (possibly not necessary with tweaking the inner glow, but i left it in for now)

Towers and gatehouses, I used the same setup, but with different drop shadows to imply different heights. That you'll need to play with yourself to determine best placement. If it doesn't do what you like it to, you may need to make another layer under it and make your own shadows by hand and stretch them out.

Whee!

[Steel General]

Good stuff!

[Coyotemax]

Before I go any further with this, I want to make sure that everyone realizes I am in no way trying to slight kittrellbj for the original tutorial, it was a great starting point for me and these effects wouldn't have occured to me if not for that beginning. I just wanted to share what I've done with it in case others are interested.

........

I fell asleep thinking on this (yay nap time) and woke up inspired. I was thinking, if one needs to go back and make corrections, it would be easier to keep the walls on a single layer, or you would need to recreate the ramparts every time you fix something.

I was originally working with the bevel to try and make the parapets, but it wasn't working, and I got impatient with it. I've been working at it on and off for the last while and think I finally have a solution.

The problem has been with the lighting angle vs bevel settings. Most of the time it looks fine, but with my walls, at any rate, there are some that are at such an angle they look flat, the parapets just wouldn't pop out no matter what I did. So after puttering, I found the following settings seem to give me the effect I'm after:
Drop Shadow: Multiply, Opacity 100%, Global light angle (on my map is -45), Distance 5, spread 0, size 10
Outer Glow (to help define the parapets at odd angles, plus makes the walls define just a bit more):Normal, Opacity 75%, colour 242424 (dark grey), size 4
Inner Glow (to help define the parapets at odd angles): Screen, Opacity 70%, colour d2d2d2 (light grey), with bevel Half Round, antialiased, range 50%
Bevel/Emboss: Inner bevel, chisel hard, depth 40%, size 2 soften 2, global light, highlight white 100% Pin Light, shadow black 100% pin light.
.....Contour: range 60% antialiased, slope = custom (6 points, i'll screenshot if anyone needs, final result should look like a straight lined wide trench)
..........1- input 0% ouptut 100% corner
..........2- input 18% ouptut 100% corner
..........3- input 20% ouptut 0% corner
..........4- input 80% ouptut 0% corner
..........5- input 82% ouptut 100% corner
..........6- input 100% ouptut 100% corner
.....Texture: none
Colour overlay: Multiply, colour 414139 (dark gray), opacity 50%
Pattern overlay: My rock pattern, opacity 100%, scale 10%

I'm looking for my rock pattern.. Apparently I didn't keep it after creating the pattern, so I made a new copy to keep around this time - it started off as a picture of a stacked wall of rocks, i turned it into a seamless pattern. (yay paint bucket). If anyone wants it, it's here for your use.

And the final result of this experiment... (don't be shy to fiddle with it, if you get better results, please let me know, heh)

Oh, and once again, towers and gatehouses are on their own layers, with different levels of drop shadow. For the main wall, I used as-is, distance 10. The gatehouses got distance 12, and the towers distance 16. Anything longer at this scale will need custom shadows.