[Award Winner] Battlemaps in Photoshop

[Juan Severino]

Can you make this tutorial as a video tutorial, that would be nice like that people can see the steps that you are doing.

THANK yOU.

[egdcltd]

Great tutorial! I've been trying to learn Blender to make battlemaps in that (and for those who think Photoshop isn't user-friendly, just give Blender a try!) but I've achieved more following this tutorial than I have in many hours in Blender. Okay, not an original creation, but here it is.

battlemap1d.jpg

[phazed]

I love your textures, is there anyway i could get them? especially that cliff texture.

[kinwolf]

Thanks alot for the tutorial! I do not have access to photoshop so I did it with krita instead, and it was quite a challenge since I have only basic experience with graphic software. From what I saw, there are some important differences btw the photoshop way of doing things and krita ways, but it forced me to experiment with krita and it was a good learning opportunity. So, here is the humble result I got. It still look very rough compared to some others I have seen in this thread, but I think it's a good first try for me
tutorial.png

I still need to figure out how to do the shadowing part of the cliff in krita. And I totally cheated on the trees and bushes and used tiles for those

[madcowchef]

Looks great! Experimenting and learning is much more important than following step by step so you got the most important part of it. Looks like a great start to making some fun battle maps for your games.

[Sitrane]

Fantastic tutorial! I have a degree in Video Game Art and Animation but there were a few tips and tricks I picked up that really helped with designing maps. Hopefully I can post a picture of my map I designed soon but it's part of an upcoming Kickstarter, so I have to keep it under wraps.

However, I am running into one major hurdle: What is everyone using to create overhead views of their trees and plants? This is proving to be extremely difficult to create something that looks realistic.

From looking at previous posts, @Kinwolf did a really great job, so I'd love to hear how you made your trees and bushes.

Any advice would be greatly appreciated!

[wdmartin]

Good stuff.

Here's a technique I worked out recently for adding leaf litter to an area. All of the textures used here came from CG Textures. I'm on Photoshop CS6, but I think all of this will work in CS5.

Suppose you have a nice little outdoor area, like this random pedestal in a field:

step1.jpg

As you can see, it's got some mud and grass layers, basically the same as in madcowchef's tutorial. I made the stone pedestal in a separate file, also using madcowchef's techniques, and pasted it in as a layer by itself.

Now we want to add leaf litter. Because dead leaves can be blown by the wind over everything here, the leaf layer needs to be above the pedestal. Here it is, using a dead-leaves texture from CG Textures:

step2.jpg

Of course, it obscures everything below it. To fix that, change the blending mode of the leaf layer to "Lighter color". Like this:

step3.jpg

This makes Photoshop compare the colors of each pixel in the leaf layer with the one directly beneath it. If the leaf color is lighter, then it's visible. If the leaf color is darker, then it vanishes. The end result is that only the brightest leaves are actually visible.

If that's all you need, you could stop there. But if you want a little more control over where the leaves go, hide the leaf layer with a layer mask, then selectively reveal the spots where you want leaves.

You could just use a round brush for this, but that tends to make it look odd. Here's an example:

step4.jpg

If the brush is soft, the edges of the leaves blur into the grass too much. If it's hard, you wind up with leaves cut off. And either way, you tend to wind up with circles of leaves.

To correct that, let's use some brush dynamics. I use two things. First, in the brush palette, turn on Shape Dynamics. Here's a screenshot.

step5.jpg

The minimum roundness has been set to 31%, and the roundness jitter turned all the way up to 100%. That should help avoid overly-obvious circular curves.

Second, let's turn on scattering:

step6.jpg

That has some pretty aggressive scattering -- 248% on both axes, a count of 2, and a count jitter of 86% (making it likely that you'll get more than one ovoid often through a swipe).

Now we can scatter leaves across the area. Thus:

step7.jpg

Due to prevailing winds, the leaves have fetched up on the left side of the pedestal with a clear area to the right. There are a few spots where the leaves don't look right -- either partially cut off, or overlapping something they shouldn't, such as the edge of a stair. I'll fix those up with a standard brush.

step8.jpg

You can go as far as adding or removing individual leaves, if you like. If the pattern becomes too obvious, you can also add a second leaf layer rotated widdershins, as with madcowchef's grass.

Hope this is useful to someone.

[Jacktannery]

Great tutorial Madcow. And that's a really good leaf trick WdMartin.

[madcowchef]

That's a great one one Wdmartin, good use of blend modes. I'd like to use that one with some trees in bloom for a spray of flower petals on the ground for one of those idyllic ruin maps, the kind that invariably include a overgrown fountain.

[ajb47]

Here's my first attempt at following your tutorial, though without the stream. I probably could have used more opacity in a couple of places, especially my cliffs.

BattleMapTut01Obj.jpg

I do have a question about the tutorial -- on the fancier damage layer mask step, you seem to be saying to add a layer mask to the clipping mask and I couldn't find the option for that. I tried a "Hide All" and it put a black mask on the damage (the part with the Difference Clouds), but what I tried after that didn't seem to match what you had written, and I liked the damage the way it was, so I got rid of the mask. I'm sure it's just my lack of familiarity with PS that tripped me up.

As for interiors, I was talking about dungeons and buildings and caves where creatures live that the PCs are supposed to encounter.

Thanks,

AJ