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I've moved this to the tutorial section. Please rate this tutorial so Hugo can get the tutorial award that this so richly deserves!
thats awesome, glad your indulging us with all this, its rather interesting!
My Finished Maps :: My Challenge Maps :: My Tutorials :: The World of Ashlon- My Obsidian Portal/World BuilderProjects
WIP :: Carian Round... Who knows...
Back Burner :: World Map
Software: 99% Adobe Photoshop (CS4), Geo Control 2, Wilbur Every so often I use another program!
I've moved this to the tutorial section. Please rate this tutorial so Hugo can get the tutorial award that this so richly deserves!
Oh, that would be most appreciated!Originally Posted by ravells
Glad this is beign interesting for you guys! There is not much "technique" here, just a little applied Photoshop and a step by step description, thou when I started doing illo work, I did find this process from other people very educative and I'm glad to share what little I know with whoever may be interested
Forgot to mention this!
The round buildings are made with vectores on CorelDraw and then exported to Photoshop. The easy way to keep a clean line while doing this is to export to EPS and then open it on Photoshop, this way you'll keep the transparent background.
I'm not a big fan of working lines in Photoshop, so when dealing with vector-like graphics, I always us this option because I work a lot faster in Corel, which compensates for the "trouble" of importing stuff into photoshop. Also working with vectors makes it super easy to leave separated elements to mix n' match and create custom buildings real fast simply by mixing and twaking a few new elements into it. Its also good to leave it blank or in grayscale and color it on Photoshop, this way you keep a more customizable building. Its also very useful to make these buildings into brushes so that you can have them handy (and light!) at all times.
I only did the round buildings with vectors because when I started the map, the whole intention was to do most of the buildings by hand, something that proved not to be very smart time-wise, and the square buildings are not too complicated to do in photoshop, but still a lot easier to do in vectors. I resorted to this tool when I saw time running short.
I should have added this step a few posts back... pardon my messy "how to"
Dome-Tower Template.jpg
Wow, I'm just now having a look at this thread again and so want to do a town map now. Thanks for sharing your tips and expertise Hugo, it is really appreciated. Repped and rated.
Cheers,
-Arsheesh
Just catching up again here myself...this is fabulous. I've got a lost city ruins map that's been brewing in my head for a while now but I have been afraid to take it on. Thanks for the workflow examples, it really helps motivate me to want to do mine as well now. Thank you!
“When it’s over and you look in the mirror, did you do the best that you were capable of? If so, the score does not matter. But if you find that you did your best you were capable of, you will find it to your liking.” -John Wooden
* Rivengard * My Finished Maps * My Challenge Maps * My deviantArt
Found the PSD file and decided to break is down further! It was kind of fun to go through the layers seen how I did it, I had a hard time remembering every step of the way
I'll start from bottom and up, begining with the water. I'm clearing up the rest of the details so that is easier to see part by part and also to help see the whole process clearer.
First having all areas defined, I erase the outline on the floodwd areas to try and make it clearer that the water is on a shallower leve level.
SYSt Water B1.jpg
Next, I set a "bottom" texture so that the water does not look so plain. This step could be done in a sigle layer using a mask on the water layer... But I like doing things heavy and complicated and did it on a whole different layer
SYSt Water B2.jpg
Next, I put the sunken buildings, as you see these do not have color and the structures are blured so that it give not just an effect of transparency but also of fading depth. You can see also on the "south" part that there are two open squares, these are the lower level of two pyramids which are half sunked, I had to do it on two levels to get the effect (hardly noticeable, maybe not worth the effort). I also added a darker backgrond shade on the southern part to add a different color to the water on the top so that this looks as a "dirtier" part, since its supposed to be a marsh area.
SYSt Water B3.jpg
Next, I add the water layer. This is a single layer with a color fill and all the "effects" are with the burn/expose tool and a texturized brush. This layer IS NOT transparent in order to give depth only in certain areas, where I erased (literally) with the erased set around 15% opacity to control the level of transparency. In some places you can see parts of the lake bottom and in others is not visible. This sets a nice level of depth and gives the sunken buildings a cool uneven level of transparency/depth. You can see here also the color difference in the marsh area (not very nice right now). You can also see that the water isn't necessary cropped to the water outlines, this is because the upper layers will cover these up and you don't need to use time outlining it again.
SYSt Water B4.jpg
Next, a simple step, a "screen" layer as a Gradient map to change the whole color of the water layers in a single step and unify the colors of whole thing.
SYSt Water B5.jpg
Finally an extra layer of water levels for "higher" flooded areas, like the damn on the southeast part and the small city area on the west part. This water had to be added on a upper layer order since these will be abode city and mountain layers, which will be added on a higher layer order.
SYSt Water B6.jpg
And that's all for water!
This is starting to look more like a serious "tutorial"
This is starting to look more like a serious "tutorial"
Yep!!! You might think about nixing this exact example(since I assume it's licensed/copyright material) and just do a proper tutorial with some original content....
On I noticed you said several times about erasing and wonder if I misunderstand or do you just not use layer masks?? and if so, why not?
My Finished Maps
Works in Progress(or abandoned tests)
My Tutorials:
Explanation of Layer Masks in GIMP
How to create ISO Mountains in GIMP/PS using the Smudge tool
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Unless otherwise stated by me in the post, all work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 3.0 United States License.
I'm not sure I understand the Nixing thing, is not OK to do it with copyrighted material? Sadly the only four finished maps I have are copyrighted
And yes, I do erased those parts and as I mentioned is because (I wasn't all to PS saavy when I did it, that was my very second colore map ever and back then I did do much coloring and layer masks where know but unused for me.
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