[WIP] WotC Style Building Maps - A Study, and Hopeful Recreation.

[Savannah]

This is a really great idea -- I often find myself looking at those WotC maps and wondering how to mimic their style.

[TheDingo]

Breaking Down The Walls - Doors, Stairs, and other Pathways.

So, we've handled the wall fixtures themselves, the things that make up barriers and walls but can't truly be interacted with. Either they're curtains which can be just walked through anyway - or they're walls and windows, which aren't going anywhere. This leaves us needing things like doors, stairways, and the like.


Doors
First off, the important one. Once again, we're using that path we used to create the walls and windows (in fact, upon realizing this, I've acquired a few ideas for better doing this in future, given we seem to be using that path so much). Simply enough - we shall create a new layer on top of everything else, labelled 'Doors', and we shall give this a 2px black stroke effect as well. Now, using our path, and a moderate sized brush (I used an 8px here), we will brush stroke the path. That leaves us with obnoxious white lines everywhere, but that's fine! Now just grab an eraser of the same or greater size, and with our grids and snapping still on - stroke along the grid lines that would frame our doors on either side. This will leave us with decidedly square-shaped doors that fit inside the pre-existing walls. Any 'excess' can just be magic-wanded (with contiguous on) and deleted quickly enough. Double-doors can be marked easily enough using a 2px black brush, and locking the transparency on the later briefly. One stroke and tada, a double door!

Now, this method does leave us with a slight problem - doors and windows are near indistinguishable. This tells me that we will need to adjust how we do windows in future - perhaps by making them even thinner, and making their stroke color the same color as the wall.Alas, that's for later.

In some parts, our doors will be 'inset' into the wall instead of dominating it, especially on the left-most section because of the fact the doors are 8px, but our walls are 12px. For this, a simple use of the marquee select tool (with grid and snapping on) over the grid squares on either side, contracted by 4px, and then deleting the resulting selection from the Walls layer quickly and cleanly removes the wall section there. Leaving only - a door.


Stairwells
This bit I had some trouble with, but found an easy, if lazy, way of doing it. On the south side of our Styx Oarsman, there is a circular stairwell. Using the grid and snapping, I merely used the circular marquee select tool, made a circle large enough for the outer wall; held down [ALT] and made a smaller circle for the inner 'post' to remove that from the selection; and hit delete on the Walls layer. A simple, 4px brush stroke and deleting a section of the wall above it, using the grid, and we had the outer border set up.


Straight Stairs
Now, the hard part - the stairs themselves. Honestly, I haven't got a clue how to do this nicely; but we'll give it a try. For this, I created a new layer above the floor, but below the grid. Simply enough, I called this 'stairs'. It was at this point I looked at the stairs in the original Styx Oarsman. The steps themselves line up with the grid, at a rate of 4 steps per grid square. They also decrease in size on each step, and that the bottom step was half the size of the top step.. This gave me an idea. Now, this took a bit of simple maths to make it work.

Large Stairs = 2 grid squares long. 4 steps per square. 8 steps. Step width = 2 squares. Grid size = 32px, topstep therefore 64px, bottom step therefore 32px. 32/8=4. So each step had to be 4px thinner than the last - or 2px taken from each side. This made things easy.

This is for the 3x2 tile stairs that join the left side of the Styx Oarsman's floors. for this, I filled that 3x2 tile with the lighter tone we've been using (200rgb), and set photoshop's grid to have 8 divisions. I used a 2PX hard eraser to stroke out the 8 steps vertically. From there, it was a bit of abuse of the Marquee Tool and the expand function. Honestly, there has to be a better way to do this, but I couldn't think of one. open to suggestions!

First, I madea box selection of 5x2 - one extra tile at the top and bottom of the stairs. Inverted the selection. I then followed a simple pattern -
1 - Expand Selection by 2px.
2 - Alt-Select using the magic wand, any step that had already been shrunken.
3 - Hit delete.
4 - Repeat.

A simple Stroke and a very, very subtle emboss later and I had a.. honestly rather rough looking stairway. But it'll do until I can think of something nicer, or someone suggests a better means of doing it.


Circular stairwells I'll post on another time, such as, when i work it out myself!