Temple of Moradin

[Simon33600]

Thanks.

What do you think of it, now?

[Bogie]

OOps Double post

[Bogie]

Yeah, now that looks like a roof!

Now lets look at the building walls.
1st, the roof should overhang the wall, so in this view with the roof, the wall shouldn't be seen at all. Make the roof a little bigger and it will cover it.
For the interior view the wall could use some texture. Stone blocks would look good, but even just a grainy texture so it doesn't look like a plain line.
I am not familiar with GIMP but it should be close enough to photoshop to follow this.
As an example, I drew a plain colored line:
Attachment 41862
Then I used the Filter Gallery to apply a couple of textures and this is what I got in just a couple minutes of playing around. The first filter is just called Texture, the second is Mosaic. Gimp should have something similar.
Attachment 41863 Attachment 41864

[Wannabehero]

Huge improvement on the roof, it looks really great now! Bogie has hit on the very next suggestion I was going to make, which is to work on the walls.

If you have trouble figuring out how to apply the texture to your walls, you can brute force it by taking a texture from the internet, such as those at CGtextures.com or any other free internet resource, place it on the layer above your walls, convert the texture image to grayscale (image -> Black and White), set the layer mode to overlay, and then mask the texture layer so it only shows through on your walls. After that you can play with the layer opacity of the overlay or the brightness/contrast of the texture until you have the right effect on your walls.

If you haven't played around with layer masks in gimp before, the gimp tutorial for it is here. It basically lets you erase something from a layer without erasing it for real.

Also, on another note, the edges of the lines drawn for the walls are very sharp and visibly aliased (the boundaries between pixels are apparent). I would suggest either a slight gaussian blur on the layer with the walls (setting of maybe 2px) to help breakup the edge, or you could also draw a very thin black line over the edges of the walls. If you do the second thing be sure that the line mode is set to be anti-aliased so you have some blending along the edges of the line. You could possibly do both things.

This map is really looking good now Simon, keep up the good work.

[Simon33600]

Thanks very much to both of you for all your advices.


As it just so happen, I have actually been trying to figure out how to sexy up the walls (I actually left another post on that subject).
the method you suggest seems much easier than the convoluted process I had been using...

[Simon33600]

Ok, I worked on adding some texture to the walls and fixing the roof overhang problem:







Now, should I blur the layer mask for the walls?

[atpollard]

I offer some fine tuning advice on the roof. My pattern is not better than yours, I selected it because I think that it is easier to see orientation than your pattern. Just rotate your roof patterns to align with the roof segments as indicated:

[Wannabehero]

Those walls look much better Simon, excellent. A very tiny amount of shadowing around the edges would help them pop out more, but I definitely like them better than the solid tan lines.

Also, a very good suggestion atpollard, I can't believe I overlooked the roof there. If you can swing it Simon, the suggested change by atp would be an excellent modification.

[Bogie]

The map is really shaping up! Nice modifications.

[maxsdaddy]

My son's character in our role playing game is a dwarf paladin who is a follower of Moradin. I will be shamelessly "borrowing" this map as a template as a place where his character can be annointed. Thanks for sharing.
have some rep.