Top Down View Brick / Stone Walls

[RjBeals]

Hi all - I'm new here, but already feel at home. You all have some incredible work here and some very helpful tutorials. I keep busy making maps for the gaming site conquer club, as I'm sure you've seen the cc crew popping up here the last few days. Don't get alarmed (most) of us are a pretty fun yet professional bunch.

But I'm posting this because I can't find what I'm looking for here. I'm creating a map where I want to use stone or brick walls as boundaries between territories. I'm not great with hand drawn art, and I don't use a tablet (only a mouse). I'm fairly proficient with photoshop, and understand layers, masking, brushes, layer blending.... but I just need some direction on how to create a wall that will not look way out of place.

The map I want to use it on is here: Iron Curtain The graphics are far from complete, as I stopped to work on gameplay ~ which is Risk style attack / fortify. I need to create impassable barriers otherwise gameplay will be insane.

I think you all get the point - if you can direct me to any sample maps with this feature, or better yet tutorials, I will be forever in your debt. Thanks!

Rob.

[Steel General]

I'm no photoshop expert and I can't think of any tutorials off the top of my head. However, I would think you'd be able to do something with 'paths'.

Walls are not overly difficult, especially top-down views. A line of appropriate thickness with a pattern overlay or other filter to give it some kind of texture and then maybe a drop shadow to give it the appearance of height. The walls on my Arvaandor map use those basic techniques. Maybe that will help out.

[RjBeals]

Wow - thats a gorgeous map! I think you're correct though. The top down view is simpler than I than I thought. I don't have the resolution or size to work with like you, but I think I'll be able to make something work. Thanks for the reply & the link.

[Sigurd]

I"m no expert on Photoshop and you probably know all this but....


If I were doing that in Photoshop - Or photoshop and Illustrator - I'd create two paths. One for all of the spaces and another for all of the country borders.
I would 'Stroke' the shape of all the spaces with a brush designed to create a dotted, or less intense, line. I would stroke the borders of the countries with a more intense boarder and place it on top.

Stroking makes your lines very uniform and equal. You'd definitely want to have clean clear unambiguous lines.

Sigurd

[torstan]

I agree with Sigurd. Definitely create paths for all of those impassable barriers. Then create masks by stroking a white line onto a black background. With that basic layer built for all of those walls you can use that as a mask for a new layer and play around with textures until you get something you like.

You can also use it to bevel your walls, if you want them to look a bit more 3D. Duplicate your black and white layer and then blur it. Now use this as a bump map for your texture layer. Play with the settings a bit, but this should give it a bit of a 3D effect.

There's a textures post in the Resources forum. I'd suggest scrolling through that until you find a nice brick/rock texture you like.

Finally, let me say that the map you've got already is looking damn fine. Please do post any progress over here. It'll be interesting to see how that turns out!

[Steel General]

Sigurd/Torstan - Thanks for validating my initial idea that paths was the best way to go. They still confuse the heck out of me in photoshop, so I couldn't give him any tips on how to go about it.