WIP: The jumping dwarf inn.

Here is a small inn I just made (as usual, most of the actual objects come from the Dundjinni fora, these guys are good).


Attachment 45079



It's on the marketplace, so you'd expect some kind of nice stone blocks there, but I didn't have any texture that looked half-way convincing, so, I instead decided to go with a "gravel" look, that looks, I think, horrible.
I'll definitively need to look more deeply into that.

Well, the placement of some of the bedroom furniture is bad. I put them before deciding to thicken the walls, and now there are some "clipping" issues. It shouldn't be too hard to fix, though...

Overall, I am not very happy with it, although, I can't really pinpoint why exactly... What do you guys think?

It looks great.
I actually think the walls look fine. The main areas I can see that you might improve are:
1) the white outline around the table and bench. Assuming you are using The Gimp (as it says in your profile), you should be able to get rid of this by pressing 'select all' on that layer, shrink selection by X pixels, invert selection, delete.
2) The shadowy areas surrounding the burrow does not really look too hot. This is because the shadows are directly on clean, un-splintered wood. I recommend you get a brownish mud texture and put some it around the hole, between the burrow/hole layer and the floorboards layer.
3) The stairs look very blurred (in fact they look stretched) when placed so close to that super-sharp and super-bright barrel; and the colours on those two objects clash, to my eyes, with each other and with the floor. You can adjust the colour of specific objects easily with the Gimp - I recommend adjusting the colours on these two objects: maybe desaturate that barrel by 30%?
4) Your wooden floor texture is a funny shade of wood. Have you tried something like this? (I attach a softer coloured wood texture in case you are interested - this is not mine; I found it online somewhere. Bogie will probably recognise it - note this is not a seamless texture: it needs to be fixed up before being tiled; it's just to try it out).

Attachment 45080

Nice start with your map. Glad you find DundJinni Forums useful.

Here are some things that might help. This is the same table but without the white edge, some different floor tiles to try for outside and inside, and a couple barrels that might work better.
A few small improvements can make a huge difference.

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Crap, you guys are awesome!


Thanks!



Also, I would not say "useful" as much as "downright indispensable". I don't use Dundjinni myself, mostly because I already have enough trouble learning Gimp, but the people over there are insanely creative and talented...

Ok, here is another take on it.

The outside ground definitively looks better (I had scaling problems with the other patterns).

I tried splintering the wood around the hole (wink-wink, nudge nudge, say no more) and to add a layer of dirt, well two, actually, one being blurred...

And; while I was at it, I took pity on the local flora and added the same dirt around the tree and in the flower bed...

Attachment 45113

Huge improvement on every level - great work Simon.

Now you need to make your walls pop out - do this: make sure your walls are on a different layer to your floor, and make a new layer in between these called 'underwall shadows'. Now get a soft black brush and paint black along your walls (either only on the inside, or both inside & outside, depending on what you want) and then use the smudge tool to blend this in. What you are aiming for is a relatively narrow (say, half a grid square wide) band of darkness that is black at the wall and fades out towards the centre of the structure. Now you can either leave this layer as it is, or reduce its opacity by c. 50%, or change the layer setting to 'Overlay'.

Eg - see top left:

Attachment 45114

Ok, here it is.

I simply selected the walls, enlarged the selection by 10 pixels and filled it with black. Then I applied a 35 Gaussian blur.

I haven't played with the opacity, I think the gaussian blur takes care of that...


Attachment 45152


It does actually make the picture substantively better, I think. As Bogie says: "A few small improvements can make a huge difference".

considering you're happier with it, i shouldn't post :) one's reasons and criteria for creation should belong to onesself :p

the layout seems modern to me, like a suburban home. i'd expect a medieval building to have more supporting columns (i see you're from brittany and not the u.s., where old buildings are hard to come by..)

quite a fancy gaming aid as is :)

No, no, you are absolutely right.


It is actually a rather big open space for a medieval(ish) building. Then again, the numerous big windows are not very historic in themselves... That could be an interesting (and probably endless) debate about what degree of historical realism do the various mappers require...


Anyway, I am going to add a few support pillars, it would look pretty cool and fill up a bit the empty space between the table and the kitchen area.

Ok, here is the version with the pillars added (it took some times as I did the pillars myself):

Attachment 45294


Also, because having a big hole in the middle of a room kinda hindered the re-usability of the map, I made a "normal" version:

Attachment 45295


And... there you have it folks...