Recreating the Styx Oarsman - General Structure
So, as per our little project, we will recreate the Styx Oarsman and ideally, recapture its creation - and potentially find a quicker means of doing so.
What I first suggest, is setting up your grids in Photoshop - battlemaps actually meant to be used for combat require some amount of control, and being able to keep things to a consistent scaling and placement will help with this endeavour greatly. It does result in, as many WotC Style maps, a sort of 'blocky' or 'inorganic' appearance - but that's what props are for later, to break up the monotony.
Myself, as I use these maps in a Virtual tabletop, know I'll likely be using these on a 16px Grid at the end of the day - so I've chosen to build the map on a 32px grid. This way, when I downsize the image 50%, my image fits nicely onto a 16px grid without a great deal of distortion. Your own decision for grid size and the like will be ultimately - a matter of personal preference.
Once this is done, I set up the most important layers for the initial framework - the Walls, and the Floor. With snapping on, I have used a 12px Brush and the Pen tool to outline the primary walls - and then gone to an 8px square brush for the smaller, thinner walls on the ship portion of the map. So far, we will keep things monochrome and easy to identify. As such, I will use this color pattern, much akin to WotC Maps -
Floors - #c8c8c8, or RGB all at 200.
Walls - #646464, or RGB all at 100.
Once the walls are mapped out, and filled using the brush tool on the paths that have been created with the pen tool - I've filled them with our Floor color.
To recreate some of the effect, and save us having to work too heavily upon the image - a few effects are going to be used on our walls layer. A 2px Black Stroke, a drop shadow, and an outer-glow set to black and multiply. The stroke gives us a solid, easy to see outline, the shadow gives us a sense of depth, weight, and light, and the black outer glow allows us to mimic ambient occlusion slightly.
(For those unaware - in laymans terms; ambient occlusion is the loss of light that you see in the inside corners of objects; light is lost in crevices.)
A second layer is made under our walls layer, for 'Soft Walls', or other such structural details, like the curtains in the Styx Oarsman, or the fences on the upper floor balcony. for this, I used a 3px brush, and applied the same effects to this layer as I did the main Walls layer - though significantly less intense.
For windows, yet another layer is made. For the sake of simplicity, I merely used the same path we did for the main walls, and did an 8px brush stroke in flat white, and applied a black stroke to its outline. This way, rubbing out part of the outer wall, reveals a typical WotC-style window in the wall.
Once you get quick with the pen tool, handling layers, and Photoshop's interface - I feel you could get to the same point I have in less than fifteen minutes. The first try of course took me significantly longer.
Reply With Quote