Thanks everyone - I was at a loss to replicate that depth of field - I'm a total n00b when it comes to photoshop. I knew it wasn't right, but had no idea how to get it the way I wanted it. The biggest problem for me is that the mote is floating in the Elemental Chaos - which means no farmland below I originally wanted an island in a sea of lava, but thought I might make it more like an Earth mote, with many hundreds of feet to anything solid. (It's for an Epic party).

ravells - your quick mock up is better than my hours-long labour!
I'll try that technique- just need to find some appropriate photos for the "Ground" shot. Then Gaussian Blur on the ground + layer with semi-transparent clouds - should I use "overlay" for that layer? (using Photoshop CS 3 I think). Did you just use "Filter>Render>Clouds" to generate your sample ?

BTW.. Any quick tips on getting my earthmote looking more 3D? I noticed the shadows in your quick mockup are well defined, but I'm not sure how to achieve that in mine. I bet there's a tutorial on 3D effects in Photoshop - I'll dig around when I get some time.


And yes - to answer the criticism that there's no fortress - I was building that directly in Maptool. Using Torstans 100px toolset, I'm unfortunately finding my Earthmote is not as big as I had hoped! I may have to resize it larger (although lower resolution - file size is already too large), or change the grid to 50px instead.

Either way, the "fortress" became more like small tower - turns out Fire Giants need a fair bit of room I began making multiple levels - drilling into the mote and building on top, but it's not looking that great right now..

That's why I'm slapping a huge WIP sticker on this

Thanks again for all your comments. I'll keep you posted as it goes along.