Forgive me if this goes too fast or makes too many jumps. I'll explain bits in more depth if you want them.
How Nytmare Makes Walls in Photoshop
- Through all of this, the only thing that matters is that your walls are black and your floors are white. Don't bother trying to keep this process transparent, because we cheat later on and only focus on where the black parts are.
- Start on a fresh layer.
- Make all the straight walls and freeform walls with either the line tool (U) or the paintbrush, both with a size of 1 pixel. (You can also make straight sections with tools like the brush with a combination of View > Snap or just by holding down the shift key while you paint.)
- If these wall sections intersect where a round wall sections will be, just overlap it and worry about cleaning it up later.
- Edit > Stroke the selection to the appropriate width. At 200 to 300 dpi I usually have my walls end up being about 10 to 20 pixels thick, depending on what they're supposed to be.
- Select the negative space and fill in with the bucket tool. Sometimes you need to do the negative space on a new layer so that you don't get a blank space between the outside wall and fill behind it.
- On a new layer(s), layout the round rooms with a combination of the round marquee tool, Select > Modify > Contract (to the appropriate wall width) and the paint bucket.
- Paint the overlapping bits white where the round parts and straight parts don't jive. (ie where a straight hallway turns into a round room)
- Right about now you should be looking at a rough sketch of only walls.
- At this point, again depending on what kind of walls I'm making, I might squish all of these layers into one layer with a white background and do a Filter > Pixelate > Crystalize at about 7 to 10 pixels to roughen them up and make them look rocky.
- Go to the Channels window. It should be the middle tab on the Layers window. If it's not there go to Windows > Channel and it will pop up.
- Hold the Cntrl key and click on the RGB layer. This will select everything that has red, green, or blue in it which is currently everything that is NOT black.
- Go back to the Layers tab and make a new layer.
- Select the inverse of what you're currently selecting either with Cntrl-Shift-I or by Select > Inverse
- Paint bucket the heck out of it. Now you have all of the walls as a separate element on their very own own layer and you can decorate them however you like.
I know that it's cheating cause I'm used to the process, but as an experiment, I'm going to try to recreate your map to see about how long it takes me. It's currently 5:02 PM...and just shy of 45 minutes later, I have this:
Reply With Quote