Dungeon Map

[grayrt]

Hi everyone -

I've been lurking for a while, and have found this place to be a fantastic resource for inspiration and education.

While I'm nowhere near some of the proficiency on display here, I'm hoping that by posting my latest WIP I can motivate myself to keep progressing. Attached is my current "homework" piece: a dungeon map intended for VTT gaming, made exclusively in Photoshop. The inspiration for this is a module I'm working on publishing at the DMs Guild site, and it's supposed to be a simple abandoned cave with a hidden secret intended to be discovered only by the worthy.

For me, this is primarily an exercise in setting up my workflow, starting with a base 24x36" template with a custom-blended background texture. I've currently got this set up to be 100 dpi, which I think seems to be working well so far. I initially tried 300 dpi in case I wanted this to be printed at high quality, and while I didn't really run into performance issues with the working file, it did seem excessive.

The linework and layer styles are cribbed from advice given by Jonathan Roberts' fantasticmaps.com blog.

Work to be done still:

1. Cleaning up the grid lines that currently run inside the cavern walls. I think this was introduced when I stroked the walls with a jittery brush, which was intended to give the illusion of a rough cavern wall. While I could just use an eraser brush to remove them, in my ideal workflow those would be obscured by a layer mask (or something) so that when I added the grid layer they just never showed up in the first place.

2. The map name text needs to be visually separated from the background texture, either via drop shadow, outer glow effect, etc.

3. A map key.

4. Additional detail objects, such as doors, rubble, dungeon accessories (statues, etc).

5. Additional map details for visual interest/aesthetics, such as an interesting border.

6. Tweaking the layer effects to bring more visual contrast between the cavern walls and the floor.