Sorceress's tower

[jfrazierjr]

jacktannery, that's the right idea and direction.... With some time and playing boogie can likely come up with a winner.... so, 3 distinct images are needed:

Begin up
Middle up/down with landing
End up

If I had some good textures to use at the moment, I would try to knock these out, but I don't really have the needed resources...

[jdblair5]

cool stuff

[Bogie]

Thanks for the help and compliments. I think I've fixed it.
Here are the 3 types of stairs:

And here are the 3 corrected tower levels:

[jfrazierjr]

The first one looks really good. The second one is rather meh... The shadows are just not distinct enough to indicate direction... the top ones need some lightening up. Third one is a good one, but perhaps needs a wall to help really sell the up/down dichotomy where it overlaps???

[Bogie]

Yeah, I wasn't crazy about the Up set either, but I was to tired last night to fix it. How's this?

[jfrazierjr]

I would say too dark at the bottom and not light enough at the top.



This is not perfect, if I had the original images in layers, I could probably get it right, but this gives the idea. The base layer should have no darkening other than the step riser shadows, and and the image should get lighter as it goes up.

I did a circular selection and a B/W gradient with an asymetrical conical gradient on a 50% grey layer set to overlay... then I painted the bottom half back grey so that the original showed exactly, duplicate the layer and poof.... If had the original, I would then add the riser shadows above all of these layers cause the lightening in my copy bleaches them out as the stairs go up.

[Jacktannery]

That's quite brilliant jfrazier - Bogie I'm going to take a copy of your first and last staircase and jrazier's middle one for use later on - it is a wonderfully useful set.

[jfrazierjr]

That's quite brilliant jfrazier - Bogie I'm going to take a copy of your first and last staircase and jrazier's middle one for use later on - it is a wonderfully useful set.

I would say hang on... the one I posted is really not quite right... I would need all the component pieces to do it up to my satisfaction... But now that Boogie has the idea, perhaps he will...

[jfrazierjr]

Oh crap..... there's a reason people don't make many circular stairs in a "realistic" style, cause it's darn hard!!



If you guys like the effect, but want different textures, just let me know where you get the textures you want and I can easily swap them out.

[Bogie]

Well, I've got the idea, not sure if I can do anything with it. ( doesn't mean I won't try ) I have no idea yet how to work with layers and some of the effects you described. I made mine by adding and subtracting shadows all on one image. The funny thing is that the darker shadowed steps look twice as dark when displayed here as they did when I made them and looked at them in photoshop.

But I agree with Jacktannery that your mod of my stairs looks much better than mine. Your second one is OK and better than a lot that I've seen, but it lacks real depth to the stairs.

I made a new version from scratch that works best on light colored textures, still a bit to dark at the top.