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Thread: [Award Winner] Assorted tips and tricks

  1. #21
    Community Leader Facebook Connected torstan's Avatar
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    Good call. I knew there was a layer effects plugin but I'd missed that.

  2. #22
    Community Leader Facebook Connected torstan's Avatar
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    Today's post on G+ was a reshare of a tutorial on creating dungeon walls using paths in photoshop. The tutorial is already on the CG so I won't reproduce it. You can find it here. It shows how to go from this:

    1.png

    to this:
    9.png

  3. #23
    Community Leader Facebook Connected torstan's Avatar
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    Default Old School Dungeon Mapping

    In honour of the news that Wizards will be reprinting the 1Ed core rulebooks I thought I'd go old school and put together a quick old school map.

    OldSchool.jpg

    This is less a min-tute as a set of guidelines:
    • The walls were placed using the tips on grids from earlier this week: https://plus.google.com/100445521601...ts/1xdFSTtKrXP
    • The colour is key to getting that old school feel - it's #18769d
    • To add the grid, open this file (http://thulaan.com/Downloads/Grid.psd) in Photoshop and go to Edit->Define Pattern. Now you can flood fill a region with a grid by going to Edit->Fill... and choosing Pattern -> 100px grid. Lock the transparency and fill with blue to get the old school blue grid.
    • The doors are white squares stroked with blue:
    Door.png
    • The statues are just a circular graphic (attached)
    Statue.png
    • I used arial bold for the secret door label, again stroked with blue (Layer Styles->Stroke)

    The (much longer) Gimp version of this tute can be found here: http://www.cartographersguild.com/sh...ol-map-in-Gimp.

    Old School Blue Maps in Maptool

    After I'd posted these tips on G+ Scott Pellegrino asked the obvious question - can you set the Fog of War in maptool to be old-school blue so that players reveal the white dungeon as they go. The answer is yes!

    Maptool.jpg

    Once you've imported your map into maptool - go to Map->Edit Map and choose the Fog tab and set the colour using the HSB settings to the values shown in the image below. Now the Fog of War is classic old school blue! You can also set the grid colour in the same way.

    The tokens in these screenshots are not mine, but come from the free token packs by Devin Night (http://www.immortalnights.com/tokensite/index.html). Check them out, they're amazing.

  4. #24
    Community Leader Immolate's Avatar
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    I really love this concept Torstan, and I learned from it as well. Repped and rated!
    ----------
    My Deviant Art Map Gallery

  5. #25
    Guild Journeyer maxsdaddy's Avatar
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    I think I can still remember the smell of the mimeograph machine when I see "old school" posts like these. lol. I need to find the poor man's version of photoshop though, still to rich for me. If I made a living at it, maybe. But hard to justify the expense as a hobby. You had a really late lunch today judging by your post time! Thanks for more tips and tricks.

  6. #26
    Community Leader Lukc's Avatar
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    Maxsdaddy, GIMP is a pretty good "poor man's" version of Photoshop (i.e. it's free), though it's still a very deep and capable prog.

  7. #27
    Community Leader Facebook Connected torstan's Avatar
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    Maxsdaddy: The original version of this tutorial was for Gimp - so it absolutely works in the free software - just follow the link in the post above. I'm also trying to keep the tutes accessible for people using Gimp as well as PS.

    Immolate - thanks for the rep and the thread rating

  8. #28
    Community Leader Facebook Connected torstan's Avatar
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    Default How to colour a dungeon map by hand

    Oops, fell behind a little on my updates. Here's todays:

    How to colour a dungeon map by hand

    Today it's back to the isometric dungeon I created in this mini-tute a few weeks ago (https://plus.google.com/100445521601...ts/djqrLxSDbTH). +Larry Moore was asking about the next step - how I'd go about taking a map like that and colouring it up. An isometric map is a little trickier than a top down map. As there aren't hard edges for the walls it's tricky to set up a selection and stroke the selection or use filters to define walls and floor styles. So I do it by hand. And here's the steps I use.

    IsometricDungeonsColoured.jpg

    Note - I'm refering to Photoshop in this tutorial, but it's exactly the same in Gimp.

    • Throw a nice textured background under your lines. I'm very partial to parchment backgrounds, but stone, cloth or other backgrounds also work well. The texture will pull the whole map together and suggest more detail than you put in by hand. Then create a new layer with the colour blend mode underneath the lines. Take a very desaturated colour (I tend to use a brown that's almost grey, maybe 5% saturation) and block in areas that should be stone. I use a grungy brush with low opacity and build up the greys slowly. You don't want heavy round brush edges here. They may not show up at this stage, but you'll notice hard edges on the colour layer towards the end. Finally, pick out the colours of non grey objects, like wooden doors and water. Don't worry about being too careful here. You'll almost certainly go back and edit this layer before you're done.
    • Add in your first layer of light and shade. I almost always use an overlay layer for light and shade. At this stage, your building up general form, so use a large brush - around the same size as a grid square. A fuzzy circular brush works well, or a grungy brush with low opacity. I like to make the floor the lightest area, as our eyes are drawn to the lightest point in an image. The walls and floors around the dungeon can be darker to suggest heavy earth and rock. I also like to darken the corner where the wall meets the floor. There's no good reason for that physically, but is really seems to work for me when detailing maps. In this case I've actually built up two overlay layers to get to here - this is mostly because my background was so light.
    • Place the detail. This is the stage that takes the time. Once again, add a new overlay layer. Reduce the size of your grungy brush by half (at least) and start working in the darkest shadows. These should be along wall edges, and in nooks and crannies of natural stone walls. I also ran a dark brush along all of the flagstone lines to give a bit of dimension to the flagstones. Now switch to a light colour, amd use a hard round brush with relatively small size and set the opacity to pressure sensitivity (if you're using a tablet). Pick out sharp highlights. These should be along the any sharp edges, like the side of an outcropping, the edge of a flagstone, the edge of a door, the bright highlight on a doorhandle. I also added the stone effect in the surrounding earth by setting the hard brush to low opacity, adding a large scatter and allowing the size of the brush to vary. I threw in some scatter in the earth to hint at rocks and stones in the earth around the dungeon.


    Now go back to your colour layer and make any tweaks you need now that the detailing's finished and you're done!

    That's another long one (I'm afraid), but the steps are - lay in the colours, block in the rough light and shade, add in the detailed shadows and highlights. I hope that helps! You can find the psd for the iso dungeon here - http://thulaan.com/Downloads/IsometricDungeonFinal.psd - feel free to play with the different layers and see what they do.

    As always, previous tips can be found on my blog here: http://fantasticmaps.wordpress.com/c...ps-and-tricks/ Feel free to reshare, and let me know if there's anything that doesn't make sense.

  9. #29
    Community Leader Lukc's Avatar
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    Nice one. What would you consider a typical grungy brush though? Which of the default PS brushes comes closest, for example?

  10. #30
    Community Leader Facebook Connected torstan's Avatar
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    In the default sets, the chalk brushes are a good start. Add in some angle, size and opacity jitter to get away from the hard edges and you've got a good starting point.

    If you're up for delving deeper into the brushes, open up the brush selector and hit the little arrow on the top right (above the Create New Preset button) and that should give you a menu with a whole load of new brushes. One of those sets is called 'M Brushes' and has a whole collection of weird and wonderful brushes. I like 'sumi 2' from that set or 'rough wash'.

    Equally, it's always worth delving through deviantArt for 'concept texture brush'. Here's a great set that turned up:
    http://browse.deviantart.com/?qh=&se...brush#/d298fus

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