[Award Winner] Mosaic Tile Map in Photoshop (& GIMP)

[Redrobes]

Really awesome. I was convinced there would be a rendering stage as the tiles in the original had the nice shadows and an overall lighting hint from top left to bottom right. So if PS can do this without bump map info then that is quite impressive.

Its also worth noting that its your fiddling with it that converts it from interesting to almost real looking. I am sure that a lot of maps here look really good but with a little extra could take them that stage higher and its often difficult to know what to do to get them to that point.

I don't have PS but my lil ole program can drop icons on a path at random rotations following the mouse track but it does not color tint them, though I could make a color tint layer manually. If I get some time I will have to try and see and post something in the other thread.

Well done - I believe you now & you can keep the rep.. ha ha

[alucard339]

Really great Don,

Thanks a lot. I will be sure to use it and soon, cause My player are starting the Skinsaw murderer adventure and I think a little mosaic map in one of the catacomb could be good for future adventure.


I thought I would have been harder to do… Maybe I will also try my map into a mosaic.


Each day, I love our guild more and more.

Thanks again,
Alu.

[ravells]

Brilliant Don - this tutorial will be one of the site's crown jewels.

[RobA]

Here's my effort - blatant rip-off, just playing with GIMP. I didn't bother with most of the detail stuff, though I added a stroke around the continents.

Also attached is the brush I created to facilitate this.
tiles.zip

I was able to follow the tutorial quite closely, with a few exceptions....

1) Gimp does not stroke along a selection well with an angular animated brush like this one. It is better to keep converting the selections into a path, then stroking the path (don't know why....)

2) No colour jitter. I got around that by creating a fairly busy gradient of the colours I wanted (or pick a pre-set) and check the "use colour from gradient" box in the pen tool.

3) I was WAY too lazy to do the expanding circle thing, so I just created a spiral in inkscape (one drawing object), converted it to a path and imported it into GIMP.

4) As always, the layer effects don't translate, as GIMP doesn't have them. I create a 50% greyscale layer, bumpmap it with the source image, and adjust the curves with necessary, applying it in overlay mode to accomplish a similar effect.

-Rob A>

[pyrandon]

I think that turned out quite well, Rob! Nicely done! I'm sure our GIMP users will be overjoyed with your instructions and brush. Very cool.

Also note that instead of (or in addition to) the gradients, one could simply draw with a low opacity darker color overtop the originally laid tiles; that would simulate the color variations nicely, too.

Thanks for doing this. I'm going to change the title of the thread to include GIMP, too.

[RobA]

Thanks.

I think there is a bit too much uniformity in the straight runs, as the brush spacing doesn't randomize. This is most noticeable on the right hand side where the vertical row of tiles exists. This could be improved if I changed the brush scaling manually between successive strokes, in much the same way I changed the gradient pattern repeat between strokes.

-Rob A>

[pyrandon]

I agree. Another option is skewing the finished runs of tile; does GIMP have any kind of liquify or warp tools?