37. You know me and that I like to over-complicate thingsSo duplicate this layer and clear the layer styles. Set the fill to zero and add a pattern overlay of Gouache Light on Watercolor; it comes with Photoshop...if you don't see it then you will have to load it in from the Presets folder (Edit > Preset Manager > Patterns > click the Load button and then navigate your way to the Adobe/Photoshop/Presets/Patterns folder and load all of those in). Set the mode to hard light and the opacity at 50%.
38. Click back on the River base copy 3 layer. Duplicate this layer and rename it to “Ripples”. Clear the layer styles (right click on this layer in the layer stack). Set the fill to zero. Add a layer style of Bevel and Emboss. Leave all of the settings alone except for shadow mode...set that at zero opacity. Add a Texture to that bevel...pick something that you like. I went with something called crystal4 and set the depth at +18. This pattern is included in the zip that comes with the tut.
39. The last part of our river will be to put some ripples around the edge. So create a new layer and rename it to “Edge ripples”.
40. This part can be confusing for rookies. Ctrl+click on the River base copy layer in the layer stack. Click on the Paths tab (or open it if you have turned it off). At the bottom of the paths window click on “Make work path from selection”. Click on the Brush tool and then at the top of the screen click that little triangle to open the Brush Picker. Scroll down the list and pick the one called “Ornament 1” (it looks like a little wave or tilda). If you don't see this brush listed then load it via the Preset manager following the steps I showed you for loading up the patterns...but this time go to the Brushes folder instead of the Pattern folder. We need to modify this brush tip so open the Brushes window (Window > Brushes). Click on Brush Tip Shape and change the spacing to 100%. Click on Shape Dynamics and set the size jitter to 100%, angle jitter at 5% (set the control for this to Direction), and roundness jitter at 100%. Click on Scattering and set the Scatter to around 300 and the Count is 2. Make sure that white is the foreground color. Still on the Paths window, at the bottom, click on “Stroke path with brush”. When done, drag the path to the trash can at the bottom of the screen.
41. Click back on the Layers tab. Filter > Distort > Ripple = use Large ripples. Ctrl-click on the River base layer. Select > Inverse. Hit the delete key and deselect. This erases white ripples on the bank. Create a new layer and then Filter > Render > Clouds. Select > Color range = black with a fuzziness of 200. Delete this layer by dragging it to the trash can at the bottom of the screen. Now hit the delete key a few times...I did it 10 times, then deselect. This erases randomly and cuts out big chunks of ripples creating something quite random looking. If there are still some ugly ripples left then just erase them with the Eraser tool (make sure that you use a small tip like 5-9 pixels).
42. Our river is finally done. It looks pretty good, too. If you want to you can play with some pattern overlays on the River base copy 3 layer.
42. Our river is finally done. It looks pretty good, too. If you want to you can play with some pattern overlays on the River base copy 3 layer.
43. On the layer stack, at the bottom there is an icon that looks like a folder...click on that. Rename it to “Terrain”. Click on the top layer in the stack, it should be “Edge ripples”. Click, hold, and drag this layer into the folder. In order the keep the layers in their proper order, continue going down the list putting each layer into the folder from top to bottom. Don't put the Background layer in. To the left of the folder name is a little triangle, click that to collapse the view. Now we have more space in our layer stack.
45. TOWN PLANNING
46. Now it's time to start thinking about our town and how it would be laid out. The first thing I look for is the high ground and plan to put a castle or fort there. Create a new layer and rename it to “Layout”. Grab the Pencil tool and draw a circle there. Next, I think about the walls and draw a line around an area that is fairly elevated but nothing too strict. I'll put my nobles here. I draw another, wider ring, to encompass a larger area for my merchants to live and work. Lastly, I draw out an even wider ring to encompass the rest of the town.
Last edited by phatticus; 06-10-2010 at 09:33 AM.
48. I'm doing a village here and it will be inside of a fort...sort of a frontier village thing. So let's lay in some rough idea of roads. Create a new layer and rename it to “Roads”. Grab the Brush tool, it doesn't matter right now what size tip that you use to draw your roads since we're not ready to worry about scale just yet. Start at the castle and draw a road that leads away from here to the river somehow. Cross over the river and continue to the edge of the screen. This will be our “Main Street”. Taking into account how we laid out our rings for the various areas, put one road that goes from the main street through the area for nobles. Put in a road for the merchant area and then a road for the peasant area. Now we can start adding in smaller streets and alleys.
Last edited by phatticus; 06-09-2010 at 03:49 PM.
49. Once we have a decent looking road layout we can start thinking about what buildings go where. Create a new layer and rename it to “Notes”. Since I'm building a frontier fort I'm going to put in some industries that support the defenses...tanner (cures hides), armoury (armor and shields), bowyer (makes bows), fletcher (makes arrows), and shield painter (designs heraldry and makes basic non-metal shields). I want these buildings to be rather close to one another, my personal preference for a small village. A large city might have these buildings on opposite sides of town or have many of them scattered around. The exception to this is the tanner – it's a very smelly place and people usually don't want it too close to where they are trying to eat their dinner.
50. There are other smelly buildings like dyer (colors cloth, leather, etc), launderer (collects chamber pots from window sills to clean clothes), slaughterhouse, soap-maker (boiling lye is smelly), chandler (they didn't have potpourri candles back then), paper-maker (not sure why but it is smelly), oiler/oynter (boils blubber for lamp oil), butterer (stale milk, cheese, and butter is smelly), etc. so I try to keep them together and away from the residences. Since nobles are usually a rather sedentary bunch they like to sleep in so there won't be a smithy or carpenter nearby waking them up in the morning. Scandalous lot that they are, smithies wouldn't want to be near them anyway. So I use the Pencil tool and draw little circles for where I want to put things. I also write in what is what so that I don't forget.
51. There are some good-smelling places like the bakery, brewer, vintner (makes wine), spice shop, and the perfumery. There are some quiet places like the scribe, book-binder, library, seamstress (plain dresses), cobbler, weaver, monastery, abbey, nunnery, church, shrine, etc. The barracks usually needs lots of space for their training yard and if you want to have a stables for the cavalry then you're going to need a large amount of space (unless they train out in the countryside), the archery range also takes up some space. Nobody wants to live near the jail, courthouse, stockade, gibbet, dong-farmer (cleans up after the horses), or other such vile places. Oh, and don't put in a thieves quarter or thieves den as these places are meant to be secret and can usually be found near the wharf, brothel, slums, underground, etc...if there is a run-down part of town you can safely assume that the thieves live there...although, most would say that the nobles are the real thieves
59. Now we have to start thinking about scale. How wide of an area does the image show? Is it a few hundred yards for a tiny village or is it a much larger distance (mile or kilometer) for a big city? Whatever you decide on is important because your brush tip size will be relevant here. If you're doing a big city and you pick a really big brush tip then the scale will be off and you'll have to redo your roads. So the next thing you have to figure out is how much does 1 pixel represent? For a big city, 1 pixel = 5 to 10 feet (for me) and a village will be more like 1 pixel = 6 inches to 1 foot. If you want you can go smaller but I'm not very good at that scale and this will result in a very large image.
60. ROADS
61. So with my village in mind I choose a 27 pixel soft round brush tip to represent 15 foot wide roads (wide enough for two carts to go by each other), since this is an odd number I set it to 30. This means that my scale is going to be 1 pixel = 6 inches. I start painting in my roads (color doesn't matter) and when done I apply some layer styles; Pattern overlay to give it some texture (I went with the mud grass again at 50% opacity), Color overlay of something tan (I went with 9C8860, RGB 156, 136, 96 at 33% opacity), outer glow and inner glow are the same tan color but outer glow is set to normal at 50% opacity and inner glow is set to screen at 33% opacity (it is also set to center and not edge), I add an inner shadow of the same tan to put some mud around the inner edges (distance is zero). Lastly, I set the fill of the layer to zero to remove any of the paint color. These roads might not final but at least they look good and their placement is near final. Later, we might have to erase and redraw in some places.
NOTES: I have chosen a scale of 1 pixel=5ft, as my town is relatively large (really, it is a city, so I wanted large paved roads). As a result, I have chosen a 5 pixel wide brush. I used a stone tile pattern from my library for the pattern overlay. I used a dark brown (58492b) for the color overlay to make the stone tiles "dirty", and then used all the above additional styles with the same brown.
Last edited by phatticus; 06-10-2010 at 05:27 PM.
62. CASTLE
63. With that done, the only thing that I really know is where I want to put the castle...on the highest ground. So create a new layer, set white as the foreground color, click the pencil tool, and draw in a castle shape. Not so easy is it? What I do is to pick the 24 pixel hard square tip. In the brush editor window I set the spacing to 300%, and then mess around with the shape dynamics of size jitter and roundness jitter (size jitter will give varying size squares and the roundness jitter will produce rectangles and combined we get varying size of squares and rectangles). Then I draw some lines. What results is a bunch of blocks that I will use to start shaping a castle.
64. Next, I grab the Magic Wand tool (it looks like a dandelion). I click on a shape and drag it into a position around one of the bigger chunks, I'll rotate if necessary (Edit > Transform > Rotate), then deselect (ctrl+d). I keep doing this until I have something that looks halfway decent. As you do this you will eventually begin to “see” with your imagination a castle shape form...it's sort of like building a castle brick by brick. Once this is done erase the unused blocks.
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