Circular tower with crenels and merlons

[Kier]

Not bad at all. I think Bogie is right, you need to widen the top step, similar to his effort, making it match the curve of the tower circumference. In GIMP items can be curved fairly easily in the Filter>Distort>Curve Bends . Also, as Midgardsormr said a little circular shadow would be good.I really believe that in 2-d shadows are needed to show the height.

My map for the monthly contest(running so far behind) revolves around a tower, and I had been gathering textures for it. I have yet to destroy it and dirty it up, this basically, quick and easy raw form. I posted it below, as an example of what I believe shadows give to it and as its a circular tower, I hope you don't mind. I don't want to hijack your thread by any means.
Tower.png

[Bogie]

Nice Tower Kier, I shall steal this one to!

[Mornagest]

Hi,

Thank you for your answers

Looks good, the edge over the stairwell would be a safety feature and it reinforces the drop-off. My only nit-pick is the top stair opening gets to narrow.
In the real world you are correct that the inner shadow would not go 360 degrees around, but by putting in that shadow it gives the eye the impression that the floor is lower than the wall. Without it, the floor looks level with the wall.

Yes, a larger opening of the stairs would be better, this could be an evidence... this usually happens to me when I'm extremely focused on something.

For the shadows, I still don't know how to do them correctly in GIMP, in fact...

Actually, there may be a slight shadow all the way around. Although the wall may not be blocking direct light, it will block a little bit of the ambient scatter. This will be most pronounced if you assume an overcast day. In 3d rendering we call this effect ambient occlusion, and it is very useful for small contact shadows and making things look just a little bit more well-integrated in the scene.

OK, OK, let's try then !

Not bad at all. I think Bogie is right, you need to widen the top step, similar to his effort, making it match the curve of the tower circumference. In GIMP items can be curved fairly easily in the Filter>Distort>Curve Bends . Also, as Midgardsormr said a little circular shadow would be good.I really believe that in 2-d shadows are needed to show the height.

My map for the monthly contest(running so far behind) revolves around a tower, and I had been gathering textures for it. I have yet to destroy it and dirty it up, this basically, quick and easy raw form. I posted it below, as an example of what I believe shadows give to it and as its a circular tower, I hope you don't mind. I don't want to hijack your thread by any means.

No, no problem at all

For the curved parapet, I didn't know that method in GIMP, I'll try this.



Thank you once again !

[Kier]

Hi Mornagest ,

I will give it a quick shot on the shadows in GIMP. For me I break the tower down into 3 layers, first the base(floor), then low wall (basically a circle of stone the crenelle) then high wall (the merlon, this is of course has gaps).

I select the low wall and FILTERS>LIGHT AND SHADOW>DROP SHADOWS, I choose 0,0 the rest of the settings depend on preference, I like 100 blur radius, then 100 opacity for low wall. This will create a drop shadow around both sides of the wall, that dark fading ring.

Then I select the high wall, the merlon, and run the same drop shadow but increase up to 150 blur. This will create a darker shadow and longer showing the height of the merlon and cast a shadow on the crenelles or the lower sections.

Thats how I do it, it is a preference of darkness and range.

I hope that helps.

[Mornagest]

Hi Kier,

Ah, I didn't know this could be as simple as that ! Thank you very much for the tip, I will try it as soon as possible and post a new trial

[Mornagest]

Hi,

Here's a new trial with the curved parapet and some circular shadow, as explained by Kier, but I don't know if the effect is good enough... ?

edit : added a trial with some walls and a second tower. Hope this is quite homogeneous... sorry for the .jpg but in .png it is too big ( ~5 Mb)