[Award Winner] Assorted tips and tricks

[Lukc]

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.

[torstan]

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

[torstan]

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.



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.

[Lukc]

Nice one. What would you consider a typical grungy brush though? Which of the default PS brushes comes closest, for example?

[torstan]

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

[torstan]

Equally, there's this set:

http://momarkmagic.blogspot.com/2010...-set-2010.html

Any of the brushes towards the bottom of the second column in that preview should do the trick.

[torstan]

I thought I'd discuss trees in battlemaps - after Anthony Metcalf asked about them. In this case I'm just talking about the decisions over the style of a tree rather than the technical question of how to actually draw one.



There are four styles of tree that I can think of that I've regularly seen and there are pros and cons to each one. A lot of the decision is really based on how you're going to use the map you have at the end. I'll go through each in turn:

1. This is probably the most obvious. You draw the canopy of the tree. It's relatively easy - and there are lots of pre made tree image you can use if you want to lay in a lot of trees quickly (for example: http://rpgmapshare.com/index.php?q=g...g2_itemId=2414). Equally, you can hand draw them, like I've done here. The down side is that this obscures anything under the canopy that you might want to show, and in particular it obscured the tree trunk. If you're running an abstract game, where forest is just a generic terrain type and being in the forest gives you cover then this is fine. However if you're playing something like 4e D&D and you need to know where the tree trunks are for cover and line of sight, this will give you a pretty map, but won't actually allow the map to be used for gameplay.
2. This approach goes in the opposite direction. Here I've just shown the tree trunk, and no canopy. This is great for tactical gameplay as it leaves you able to throw other details onto the forest floor, like fallen trunks or meandering streams, without any problem with the players being unable to see them. However, it's less obviously a tree, and it's just not as pretty. It's the approach I took for my Leafless Wood map pack, which I still drag out whenever my players end up in a fight in a clearing: http://www.rpgnow.com/product_info.p...ducts_id=61123
3. Here I've gone for a happy medium. It's more abstract, as we have both the canopy and the trunk beneath. You can decide when you colour it whether you want to just leave the line art to designate the extent of the canopy, or whether you want to add in some leaves around the edge. I first saw this style done by +Mike Schley on some maps he did for Wizards, and it certainly makes for attractive battlemaps that are also useful for tactics. It's a little more time consuming, but I think it's worth it for the versatility. The one downside I've seen with this style is that if you also have a lot of ground level detail like streams, fallen logs, mushroom fields and such, then it can get very crowded and it can be hard to read off the important information.
4. Here I've just shown the branches of the tree. It works well for winter scenes and you can clearly see the extent of the tree as well as the location of the trunk. However this comes with a health warning. Doing the line work can be time consuming but it's as nothing compared to the amount of time it'll take to colour and shade. Think very carefully before doing a map with more than a couple of these on it. You're likely to regret it, however pretty they look at the end of the day!

[torstan]

I was asked the following question over on the Paizo boards:

Can I ask a question about city design?

I see advice I've seen elsewhere -- start with the streets.

But -- how? How do you know how to design the streets? How many to put within a space, when to do twists and turns, when to leave things straight? I imagine some of it's random, but there's also usually some kind of logic to city design--what kind of logic do you apply and when do you decided for good reason, to deviate from it?

I know when I've tried to do "streets first"--I end up then realizing I need more space for X building or something and have to start over. Or the street network just doesn't look "natural." I'm sure some of that comes with time and practice, but it'd be nice to get some pointers.

Here's the answer:
@DeathQuaker- You're absolutely right. I know I said 'start with the streets' but that was a little disingenuous. You need to know where the streets are going to and from so you do need to know the locations of major landmarks first. So I think it's better to say - start with the important tactical terrain. Rivers and hills. You don't need to pin them down precisely and render them up beautifully, but you do need to know where they are.

Power centers are almost always on top of a hill as they started off small, and needed to be in the best place to stave off attack. Or they'll be in a bend in a river, so that they're defended on 2 or 3 sides by water. If a city can be beside the water it will be, and again as the city started small, the power center and the old town will be at the waterside. So you need to know where the rivers/coastline and hills are.

Once you've got that, you know where the old town is. All main roads to other cities will lead to the power center, because that's where they started. They'll follow the contours of the land and will be constrained by where they cross rivers. Draw these in, and feel free to put in wiggles and kinks - roads don't necessarily go straight.

Now you start creating the rest of the city. The old town normally has a wall around it - again from the history of being attacked. You need to decide on whether the newer wider city has walls around it too. Walls restrict the passage of major roads - so they're important.

So now you should have:
1. Rivers and hills
2. Power center
3. Walls on the old town (and newer town)
4. Major roads from the center to the outside world

At this point, pick some major locations that people are going to need to get to/from. Some ideas:
• Docks
• Market
• Granaries
• Arcane University
• Temple district/center of worship
• Barracks
• Secondary power center (parliament/royal residence).

It's also worth pencilling in the different demographics of the quarters of he city now as well such as:
• Rich merchant/nobles
• Artisans
• Slums
• Warehouses

The major locations will work as focal points for your roads - people need to get there, so large roads will come off them like spokes off a wheel. Again, don't make them rod straight, allow them to have kinks and doglegs in them - but make sure they go in one clear direction. If there needs to be a road from the barracks to the palace and from the Barracks to the city gates, make sure it's clear that it does - but still remember that roads also go round places, and are designed to leave roughly rectangular spaces for building houses.

Now you should have a spider's web of main roads and you need to fill in the big irregular spaces with little roads to define the different districts. This is where the demographic of an area comes in. Slums are unplanned and ungoverned, so roads go where they need to , not where they should. let your pen wander and lay in a messy labyrinth of twisting alleyways.

On the other hand, merchants and nobles live in large houses with land around them on straight tree lined avenues. Place straight(ish) or gently curving roads in these areas, with lots of space for mansions. Grids look good for this too, and quickly give off a sense of ordered planning. Middle class areas are similar, but with smaller areas between roads, or with tenements, and more alleyways. Keep the roads to straight lines and sharp angles here too to retain a contrast with the slums.

Now you should have a reasonably clear city plan - and you've defined it by drawing the roads.

I've attached the City of Redwall that I created for Jaye Sonia's world of Rhune (http://rhunedawnoftwilight.com/). It's a dwarven city, so even the poorer areas aren't totally without a sense of order, but hopefully it's clear from the road layout what the main areas are, even before you check out the legend.

As always, feel free to share this round, and if you want to check out older tutorials, search for the #fmtips hash tag, or go to the tutorials section of my site: http://fantasticmaps.wordpress.com/c...ps-and-tricks/

[torstan]

One incredibly useful tool in photoshop is a good dynamic grungy brush.

The human eye looks for detail and texture, or patterns and regularity. If you use a hard edged round brush in your work, there will be hard edged circles in your work. We're very good at picking them out, so your audience will see them. On the other hand, if you use a brush with splattered edges, a random orientation and a variable size then there will be no pattern anywhere. Then the human eye sees other patterns and forms. It sees texture that isn't there, and fills in regions with the texture it believes it should see.

So - build yourself a nice random grungy brush to fill in texture and you're getting your viewer's overactive brain to do 9/10 of the work for you. This is an inescapably Photoshop centric tutorial. You can achieve similar results in Gimp but the process is pretty different.



In Photoshop, either create a splattered shape by dropping ink on a page and scanning it in, or pick up this set of free brushes here: http://myphotoshopbrushes.com/brushes/id/372

1. Use a collection of the brushes or ink shapes to make an roughly oblong shape with lots of spikes, spatters and edges. Add some opacity variation to build up the shape. Select the full shape and go to Edit->Define Brush Preset.
2. Go to the brush dialog. It's going to look pretty dull. To make it more interesting add some shape dynamics. I set the brush size to be determined by the pen pressure and throw some size jitter on top. Add in 100% angle jitter - this will turn the brush from an obviously repeating shape to a random smooth brush. Now save the brush - by clicking the New Brush Preset button at the bottom right of the brush dialog.
3. Play with your new brush! It should give you a nice variable spattered texture.

Later in the week we'll be using this brush to finish up and colour last week's trees.

[torstan]

Today I'm walking through my method for colouring trees. This follows on from this mini-tute/discussion on different tree styles from last week.

I'm working with style 1 from that tutorial here, though it can be directly applied to the other styles just as easily.

The problem with trees is the leaves. You can't just draw a green sphere and call it a tree, because we know trees are detailed objects with lots of leaves. Equally you can't draw every leaf as it'll drive you crazy, and your players won't appreciate it. So the trick is to give the impression of detail without painting every single leaf. This is where custom brushes come in. On Monday I covered how to create a grungy custom brush.



With this brush, we now jump into the tree itself.

• Pick two colours, different shades of green for a summer tree, different shades of orange/red for an autumn tree. In Brush Dynamics, set Color Dynamics to jitter the foreground/background colour, and also add in some random variation on each of the hue/saturation/brightness values. Also add in some scatter. Now use this brush to paint in a colour layer as a base for your tree. The colour jitter means that you never paint with the same colour twice. The scattering means your brush layes down lots of independent overlapping jittery patterns.
• Now we'll give the impression of leaves, and some general shape and form. Add an overlay layer, pick a dark blue for the shadows and a light yellow/white for the highlights. I'm keeping the scatter, and the jitter on the brush here. As the colour jitter is only 50% foreground/background it means it'll lay down more of the foreground colour than the background. So with the foreground set to the dark blue (and the background set to light yellow) I lay in large low opacity shaps around the shadowed regions. Build them up slowly and see what the tree starts to look like. When I'm happy with that, I switch the colours round (x on the keyboard for speed), reduce the brush size and increase the opacity to about 60%. Then I work in scattered highlights that give the impression of leaves.
• The last step is to really sell the shape of the tree. Add a soft light layer. Turn off the colour jitter and use the same bright yellow (almost white) with a low opacity to highlight the top of the tree. Switch colours to your shadow hue (dark blue) and build up the tree shadows. Try to follow any contours of the line drawing. Trees aren't just great masses of leaves - they clump and bunch and have shapes inside the groups of leaves. When you're happy with this, add a multiply layer underneath the other layers and use a low opacity brush with your shadow he and lay in a cast shadow to bring the tree out of the background.

That's it! It's pretty quick, even for lots of trees. If you're doing a lot of trees, make sure you change colours a little for each one, and give them a wide range of sizes to avoid them looking like cookie cutter copies.

If you'd like to use this tree, the psd file is here:


And here are the pngs with and without shadow (CC-BY-NC-SA):


These pngs are CC-BY-NC-SA - so feel free to use these for any non-commercial project.