Make sure you keep the shadows going in the same direction.
Take a look at your first rock example again, not the most recent one. In the right-hand side, you have shadows falling to the right of the rocks (from the drop shadow effect). But if you look at the hill that the rocks are sitting on, the LEFT of the hill is in shadow, and the RIGHT of the hill is lit up. So in that example the rocks and the hill have to contradictory light sources.
You can obviously HAVE multiple light sources in an image, but generally those sources should affect every object alike. There is some artistic wiggle room on this -- ambient occlusion shadows are a thing -- but in general it helps to keep consistent lighting throughout.
I often make a blank layer on top of everything else and just draw in some lines denoting the global light source and which angle it comes from, and blotchy blobs of color showing weaker, local light sources and how far out they extend before attenuating. I name the layer "Light Reference" or "Light Ref" and just hide and show it any time I want to check if my shadows are falling in the right direction.
I hadn't really thought of the shadows on the hill as being shadows, as they were there to denote the slope. I don't think there's any way around using shade there, as only part of the rise is depicted, so using a combination of shadows and highlights might be tricky. Perhaps simply altering the global light position might be better (I suppose that's an advantage of Blender - you don't need to guess where the light is coming from).
I think there may be a slight blurring of the line between relief shading and shadows here. And I can't blame you because I find this one a bit tricky to grasp myself.
The land is relief shaded, in that its form is described by how much light is hitting the surface, given the position and angle of the sun. Relief shading is not a true shadow, but a sort of 'reflected light intensity map', if you like. So if the sun is fairly high in the sky the slopes, especially the steeper ones, will reflect less light than the flat surfaces, which is why you have a relief shading shadow on the face of your steep grassy slope even though its facing the general direction of the sun.
The relief shading also affects all the smaller objects in the map, so that the vertical side of anything will be darker than the top.
[EDIT: except at sunrise or sunset, when the flat land will be darker than the slopes on the sunlit side, but that's just complicating the explanation here so please ignore...]
I think you've got the right general idea of shading the stones in that very last image you showed us, and that you are also right in that the dividing line between the shadow and the highlight within the stone needs to be move way over to the left, so that most of the stone is seen as flat.
...
Moving on to the shadows themselves...
Once you have got the relief shading sorted out the shadows should be easier than before, because the relief shading will enable your eye to interpret the land form in a more 'solid' fashion.
Well... that's the theory anyway
Last edited by Mouse; 02-04-2017 at 07:33 AM.
Free parchments | Free seamless textures | Battle tiles / floor patterns | Room 1024 - textures for CC3 | GUILD CITY INDEX
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One problem I'm having with shadows is that I've been doing them in bands, and decreasing the opacity. Unfortunately, this means there's an overlap where the opacity is higher. I've attempted to make a gradient brush, but that hasn't worked out so far.
shadowmerged.jpg
LOL! now you are talking way over my head. I'm a CC3 mapper with only very scratchy understanding of GIMP. So far, helping has simply been a case of talking at a higher level than the software itself, but now your getting all technical on me and I'm sorry, but I just can't help with that.
Free parchments | Free seamless textures | Battle tiles / floor patterns | Room 1024 - textures for CC3 | GUILD CITY INDEX
No one is ever a failure until they give up trying
I am so confused right now. I swear I posted here about an hour ago, but my post is not here. I wonder if I just hit Preview and then closed the tab?
Evidently. I hope you hadn't just spent an hour trying to write it!
Free parchments | Free seamless textures | Battle tiles / floor patterns | Room 1024 - textures for CC3 | GUILD CITY INDEX
No one is ever a failure until they give up trying
I'm actually using PS CS2, not Gimp. Does that help?Originally Posted by Mouse
I bought CC3 many years ago, and never managed to accomplish anything with it. I'm impressed with what you've done using it!
@wdmartin It's a pain when a post you write disappears. Especially if it's a long one.
No not at all! LOL!I'm actually using PS CS2, not Gimp. Does that help?
I bought CC3 many years ago, and never managed to accomplish anything with it. I'm impressed with what you've done using it!
I think people who are equally conversant with vector and bitmap graphics packages are some kind of mentally ambidextrous.... a polymath or something. It seems that most of us are one thing or the other, but only very rarely both
And I am impressed with what you have learned to do since the beginning of this thread
Last edited by Mouse; 02-05-2017 at 09:05 AM.
Free parchments | Free seamless textures | Battle tiles / floor patterns | Room 1024 - textures for CC3 | GUILD CITY INDEX
No one is ever a failure until they give up trying
Thanks! Currently building planets - I decided to create illustrations for every one in something I just finished writing. This may have been a mistake - according to what I've written, I need 13 planets, 5 of which are definitely not terran, a gas giant, a nebula, an asteroid and a black hole.
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