royal crypt

[damonjynx]

Hi CC, Great little map. Have you considered adding a subtle shadow and small outer glow along the walls to make them "pop"?

[CluelessCartog]

i've been messing around a bit with layer effects, but i haven't got it down to the point where i think it looks good on a map yet. any attempt i make at manually adding shading looks very ham-handed....

[wdmartin]

Try this:

On the layer containing your walls, add an Outer Glow layer effect. By default that's a pale yellow. Change the color to black, and then change the blend mode of the effect to Multiply (I believe the default is Screen, but it might be Overlay). A little further down, change it from "Softer" to "Precise", and then fiddle with the size and spread options. That should give a bit more sense of depth by simulating the ambient occlusion at the base of the wall.

[DaggerAndBrush]

I like how it came out. The mumified bodies add a lot to it. Did you decide to not go for the sketch in the final version?

[CluelessCartog]

wdmartin, thank you! i do like the layer effects, but i'm not sure if i want to totally rely on them to get that polished finish to my maps. i may just forgo them for now and try to develop my technique to get that look.

daggerandbrush, i took some of the comments to heart while developing the map so i did depart a bit from the original design. i think that the wrapped bodies add a bit more flavor to the overall look.

[wdmartin]

Hmm! Okay, so here's a technique that doesn't use layer effects to get a similar effect.

I assume that you have the floor on one layer, and the walls on a different layer above that. So:

1) Insert a new layer between the floor and wall layers. It should be blank - nothing on it. Set its blend mode to multiply.

2) Switch your foreground color to black.

3) Switch to the paint brush tool. Make it a large, soft brush. Try one with a diameter roughly equal to the width of the squares initially, and adjust to taste later.

4) In the tool preferences above the work area, look for the option labeled "Fill". Set it low. Say, 5%. I occasionally go even lower.

5) Draw along the edges of a corridor. Keep the center of the brush area parallel with the wall, so that about half of the brush width extends outward over the square of floor adjacent to the wall. Initially it may be hard to notice an effect.

6) Repeat the motion, drawing over the same space each time. You should begin to see the area growing slowly darker. It may take several passes to reach a suitable darkness.

7) Repeat along the edges of each corridor and room. It may take a while.

The Fill control is another way of messing with the opacity of the pixels. I am not 100% certain of the internal mechanics of it, but I infer that the percentage setting controls how much darker any given pixel gets on each pass. If your Fill is set to 5% and you paint over a fully transparent pixel with black, then that pixel becomes black at 5% opacity. On the next pass, that increases to 10% opacity. And on the next, to 15%. And so on.

Your hand will likely wobble a bit, and the multiple passes will not line up perfectly with one another, leaving the darkened area ever so slightly irregular in shape. That's fine, and in fact the the advantage of this technique: it is hand-drawn, with a more organic feel than layer effects. It allows you to slowly build up areas of color with smooth transitions.

It will also take a while! All those passes eat up time. That's the disadvantage.

The same technique is handy for wells and pits -- keep your cursor in one spot and decrease the size of the brush once in between each click to get shadows dropping down the sides of a vertical well shaft. Likewise, it's handy for drawing things like cave entrances.

I would give a couple of example images here, but unfortunately I am away from my usual computer at the moment and don't have access to Photoshop.

[DaggerAndBrush]

I would be most interested in some sample pictures. Always keen to get to know new techniques or different ways to achieve an effect.

[wdmartin]

Sorry for the long delay in responding, I got busy.

Sure, here's an example.

flow-shadow-example.jpg

The shadows around the bases of those walls were put in using a brush at 70px, 100% softness, solid black, and flow 5%. I gave it about 8 passes, then increased the size of the brush to 100px and gave it a couple more to even out the darkening.

And here's the PSD.

flow-shadow-example.psd

I did throw a couple of layer effects on the wall layer, but the shadows over the floor were done using the technique I described above.

EDIT: Oh, and should specify that it's just the shadows where the wall meets the floor. The cracks in the floor were an overlay pattern.

[waldronate]

Outer glow is very approximately a color-filled and blurred copy of the original in the same place. A drop shadow is very approximately a color-filled and blurred that is offset in the direction of the shadow. One way to get an outer glow is to duplicate the layer, put it under the original layer, select everything that's not transparent, optionally contract your selection by a few pixels to get a harder edge on the shadow, fill the selection layer with a solid color (black for dark shadows), and then blur it to fade out the edges. For a drop shadow, follow the same steps, but then offset the new layer a bit down and to the right to get a drop shadow.

The most correct way to get an outer glow is to computer a distance field and then fill a gradient along that field. However, most imaging programs don't provide that sort of primitive except encapsulated in another filter. In contrast, a shadow (as opposed to a simple drop shadow) can be synthesized by copying a layer multiple times and moving each copy a little bit in the direction of the shadow. Blur the final result.