My first serious, non-tutorial map
Hi Guys,
I have been reading tutorials and practicing and this is the first decent map I have managed to come up with. its for the 2nd encounter of the siege at bordrin's watch adventure. I still have a lot to go, but I was looking for comments on the shadows and if the layers actually look like they should. e.g. there is supposed to be sunken seating, a raised balcony around the outside and a raised dias in the centre.
Monastery2.png
Your outside levels look raised and lowered, but the dias looks flat and could use some more shadows and maybe highlights. A bevel of only a pixel or two width might help on the stairs as well as a bit more shadow. Looks like you are well on your way to turning out some good looking encounter maps.
I'm not sure how high you want the balcony to be, but it currently looks about 4/5 feet off the ground. If you want it to look higher, the shadow should be farther away from it. I love the textures you're using, where did you get them/can I have them?
Thanks for your input.
I have changed the Dias to use a bevel like madcowchef suggested and I am much happier with the result. I have also increased the shadows on the balcony and the outer wall as jkat718 suggested and it does definitely feel like the balcony is much higher now. I also added a handrail to it to define it further. Next I have to find a way to make the stairs that lead to the balcony and into the seating pits. I am not sure how to create this yet, I will hit up Google for some tutorials but if anyone knows a good one please link it to me.
The marble texture I am using for the floor came from the RPTools Tutorials download page here Image Library « RPTools Tutorials, from the "Mapping Objects" torrent.
The Dirt texture came from Free Seamless Textures, he has quite a few nice free textures there.
Monastery2.jpg
Last edited by Minimalistix; 04-23-2014 at 02:20 AM.
Thanks for that link, Minimalistix. I'll take a look when I have more time.
No worries,
I spent some time on this today and sussed out the stairs. I am pretty happy with the way they turned out. I am not happy with the blood yet but I will have another go at it later, along with some mess to make it not look so new, since there has just been a battle there before the PC's arrive. I also havne't run the blur over most of the shadows yet.
Monastery2.jpg
One tip I think is worth mentioning is that, over the border between the different altitudes, the blood should not be connected. That way, it looks like blood was splashed onto the wall, not dropped from directly above.
What program are you using? There are some great tricks for getting blood splatter for PS, I'm sure gimp as well but I'm not as familiar with them. A bit of wet edges & scatter on your brush setting along with two copies of your blood layer the top one set to color burn and then messing with opacity does a nice job.
A google search for "GIMP blood splatter" turns up a number of tutorials on YouTube and brush packs. I would mix and match whatever you think looks best.
Thanks for your tips I tried a few different methods but in the end I settled with creating the blood pools manually using paths -> fill maroon -> set to multiply. For the smaller drops I used the "splatter" dynamic brushes that GIMP ships with. then bevelled it all 1px.
In this version I have changed the texture on the balcony and balcony stairs to a nice hardwood, just to make it stand out better from the marble floors of the central section.
This version is probably good enough for the encounter now. So unless anyone can think of anything else I need to add or change, I will move onto my next one.
Monastery2.jpg
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