Need help Plz

[jfrazierjr]

Here is my quick repesentation of a waterfall from a 80 or so degree angle in the sky. I have limited art skills, but hopefully, this will at least give you kind of an idea. I did this in GIMP in about 30 minutes. I am sure others can do a much better job that what I have presented here. Note how the drop shadows, in combination with the blurred "lower" level parts of the terrain give it at least some Illusion of height. I know there are a few parts that don't look right, but like I said, I did it in about 30 minutes and did not go back to clean up some of the mistakes I had made.

Joe

[Redrobes]

Well, I would say that your particular map is kinda tricky because of the angle. If you go top down then its not going to look high. I would just find an image that looks like the cliff you need and show your players and say you are looking at this...

Still, you can use cliff stamps. Whenever I go near to cliffs, water and rocks and stuff I take photos and chop them up.

Try these water textures :-
http://www.cgtextures.com/textures.php?t=browse&q=2194

then some cliffs...

http://www.cgtextures.com/textures.php?t=browse&q=2060

and try to combine them up. This is what I did in about 2 mins with stuff I had lying about.

Check out all of http://www.cgtextures.com/ as they have lots of stuff that can be clipped together to make some cliffs.

[benjamin.orchard]

Well, I would say that your particular map is kinda tricky because of the angle. If you go top down then its not going to look high. I would just find an image that looks like the cliff you need and show your players and say you are looking at this...

Still, you can use cliff stamps. Whenever I go near to cliffs, water and rocks and stuff I take photos and chop them up.

Try these water textures :-
http://www.cgtextures.com/textures.php?t=browse&q=2194

then some cliffs...

http://www.cgtextures.com/textures.php?t=browse&q=2060

and try to combine them up. This is what I did in about 2 mins with stuff I had lying about.

Check out all of http://www.cgtextures.com/ as they have lots of stuff that can be clipped together to make some cliffs.

Thanks a bunch! That looks really good.

I'm not adverse to learning GIMP, but I don't really have a ton of time. I always find raster programs mystifying and vector programs to be very intuitive (GIMP vs. Inkscape; Photoshop vs. Fireworks--I get and can do pretty cool stuff in both Inkscape and Fireworks, but GIMP and Photoshop both mystify me. Go figure.). I'll use what you've got here and go from there.

Thanks, and if anyone has any ideas about the wall issue, I'd appreciate.

[jfrazierjr]

This is what I did in about 2 mins with stuff I had lying about.

heh... see, I told you someone would step up and make a much better example than my pitiful skills allowed.

[Midgardsormr]

For those walls, see if you can't find a wall stamp without doorframes. You want something that will tile without looking like it's tiled, and the walls you have now don't do that. They look like movable partitions to me.

I'm at work at the moment, so I can't really whip up a useful example, unfortunately.

Give some thought to frazier's suggestion of making the entire map in GIMP and forgetting about trying to come up with decent tiles.

I'm not sure how well it translates to the GIMP, but try your hand at using this tutorial for making dungeon maps in Photoshop:

http://www.cartographersguild.com/showthread.php?t=716

And check out http://www.cgtextures.org for some really nice photographed textures. They don't tile, but they're enormous, so it doesn't really matter--you can usually just crop them to the size you need, or if you're exceptionally clever you can hide seams underneath walls.

I found the combination of those two resources, along with a few pieces of art from http://www.dundjinni.com very useful in creating my first dungeon battlemat for a mapping challenge a couple of months ago:

http://www.cartographersguild.com/sh...?t=1626&page=2

[Redrobes]

...They don't tile, but they're enormous...

But we can tile (almost) anything by going here...
http://www.cartographersguild.com/showthread.php?t=1373