March/April Lite Challenge Entry - Bridges Over Troubled Air

[TheBigBlueFrog]

Not sure if I'm doing this right. It's my first time participating in one of the challenges, and I'm not sure if I'm tagging the image properly.

### Latest WIP ###
Bridges-over-Troubled-Air.jpg

I'm going to continue tweaking this one up until the deadline. I need to add some way of getting to the map, like a magical portal or a trapdoor that would (supposedly) come up the stone column from within. Hey, it's magic!

[torstan]

Yep, that's spot on. You can see that your image now shows up in the image thumbs. Great idea for the challenge!

[TheBigBlueFrog]

Excellent! I'm glad that worked. I'm pretty happy with it so far. It's a mixture of Illustrator (to get the extrusion) and Photoshop with liberal use of stock photos and custom brushes.

[octopod]

Oh, that's fun. Awesome. I was toying with the idea of islands sticking up above a sea of clouds, but I couldn't get the bridges to work out at all. These are really nice -- drawn in Illustrator?

[TheBigBlueFrog]

I only used Illustrator to do the original extrusion. It's quicker than working in a dedicated 3D renderer, even if it takes a little longer to tweak. I wouldn't use it for any high-end 3D work, but for something like this, it was quick and easy.

Here's the extrusion I started with:

perspective.png

The rest is all Photoshop.

[TheBigBlueFrog]

Realized that if I'm going to make any more changes to this, I'm going to have to have them done by tomorrow. I guess that means I'll be up late tonight after game night. We're playing Scales of War D&D4e. Some nice battle maps in that set.

[Bogie]

Excellent concept, great work. My only constructive criticism is that there is something about the pattens and the grid in the green grass that gives it the illusion of being partly transparent or ethereal. Maybe make the grid lines a little more defined?

[TheBigBlueFrog]

Excellent concept, great work. My only constructive criticism is that there is something about the pattens and the grid in the green grass that gives it the illusion of being partly transparent or ethereal. Maybe make the grid lines a little more defined?

Thanks for the crit, Bogie. Yeah, when I showed this to my game group, printed out at playable size, most of them missed the grid. I also need to make it clearer how many grid squares the bridges take up. it's about three boards per suare, but it's not exact. The whole map is ~21x21 squares.

[Inriconus]

I like it. It has that Kung Fu Training feel to it. I noticed the shadows of the posts aren't parallel with each other, but that can change due to terrain levels. Anyway, great concept and good work so far.

[TheBigBlueFrog]

Yeah, I freehanded the post shadows in, but everything is on its own layer, so I can fix them. Might work on that tomorrow. Game night lasted longer than I expected.