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Thread: January 2013 Entry: The ruins of Ningan/orc worg-lord village

  1. #11
    Community Leader mearrin69's Avatar
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    LOL. I was trying to save server space. That one's about 75% of resolution. Here's one at 100%. There's really not all that much detail to see...and it looks better zoomed out than in
    M

    Edit: To do list includes adding rubble and cleaning up ruin edges, some are a bit soft because of my crummy masking. Also, adding some details like pens for the wolves (dire), gardens, and so on in the orc village. I'm also thinking about running the path along the walls to that ruined bridge up north and putting in a rough wooden bridge...seems there should be some way to cross the river. I might add some debris in the river near the ruined wall crossings and bridge pilings, as one would expect some logs or something to have collected. Need to do something with the river as well. It's a bit too uniform. I'll also try to improve the trees...not liking what I've got there right now. Any other suggestions?

    For those who are interested, I used RPG Citymap Generator to create a "Small town with incomplete wall around city center" and an "African village (fortified) with circular huts". I did some editing of those maps by hand and then used the generated shapes as a base for my map layers. I really find that program to be pretty useful for mapmaking...even though it sometimes generates dreadful results (especially for roads) you can usually clean them up pretty quickly into something useable.

    ### LATEST WIP ###
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    Last edited by mearrin69; 01-20-2013 at 12:54 AM.

  2. #12

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    I really like how your ruins are turning out...I'm still trying to learn photoshop and struggled like hell during one of the previous lite challenges

    Are you drawing the whole building and then erasing part of it...or covering up part of it with your background....or just drawing part of the building?
    *Most of my Maps can be seen in full resolution on my blog*

    *I've made some of my maps into full adventures available for download at DriveThruRPG.com or Paizo.com

    This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License unless stated otherwise in the thread.

  3. #13
    Community Leader mearrin69's Avatar
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    Thank you very much. There are a ton of ways to do things in PS and it takes a bit of messing around to come up with a good way to accomplish whatever task you're trying to do. I've come up with my methods through quite a bit of trial and error...and I'm always finding new, better ways to do things in it.

    My buildings are drawn whole and then masked back out. If you take a look at the attached pic of my layer stack you can see how I've done it. The "ruin mask" layer contains filled shapes of the buildings with a mask (both attached). The two sub layers over that contain the same filled buildings with a layer style with texture, bevel and so forth. The "building walls" layer was selected and then I contracted the selection and erased the middle portion, leaving me with walls. When you paint into the mask it hides everything sitting on top of it...so you get the look I've got there.

    I included the whole stack so you can see how I've done other things as well. The ground layer consists of layers filled with textures and then masked to let layers below show through in places. The brush layer has a layer style to sort of make whatever I paint there pop up and look a bit 3D. The "ork village" folder contains layers for the huts, walls, and so on...as well as the trees. The stuff on top is just a kludgy way for me to do certain things: "overgrowth" lets me paint some vegetation on the ruins and rubble. "building shadows" contains hand-painted shadows to make the ruined buildings look 3D. "tower and wall shadow" lets me paint shadows over the ork huts and trees and things, which live in a higher layer than the wall itself. "grunge" is just a grunge texture set on multiply and masked. I paint into the mask to dirty up the manmade (or orkmade!) stuff, to make it less uniform. I love my grunge layers!

    Hope you find some of this useful.
    M
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  4. #14
    Community Leader mearrin69's Avatar
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    Hi all,
    I might call this done at this point...but, knowing me, I'll keep tweaking it until the end. Hope you like it!

    Looking forward to seeing the other entries completed. Looks like some good stuff coming up this month. Good luck to all!
    M

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  5. #15
    Guild Adept Troedel's Avatar
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    I like this map very much. One thing my eye stumbled upon is the red color for the text. But that may depend on taste and you can't debate about that

  6. #16
    Community Leader mearrin69's Avatar
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    Yeah. I went with red because of the quasi-Chinese theme of the setting. It is a bit brash, however.

    Thanks!
    M

  7. #17
    Guild Journeyer Freehand 5.5's Avatar
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    I think the red is quite fitting. But you should outline everything in the same way.
    One is outlined thick, one thin, one none at all. Maybe it looks better if you outline everything like the Ningan-headline.

    ... or perhaps you could try to outline it in an average background green.
    Last edited by Freehand 5.5; 01-24-2013 at 01:17 PM.

  8. #18
    Community Leader mearrin69's Avatar
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    The difference in outlining/opacity is because the chop (upper right) and rose (lower left) are supposed to be approximating a stamped-on overlay of the sort you see on Chinese documents (using a carved stamp and water-based pigment). The title and scale are modern attachments. I'll have a look at tweaking things...maybe I can come up with a better approach.
    M

  9. #19
    Community Leader Guild Sponsor - Max -'s Avatar
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    Indeed this red isn't easily readable (especially the small text above the headline). Using red over green makes a complementary color contrast which isn't the easiest to do and to make clear...btw the map is cool

  10. #20

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    Have you thought about making a border for the map and placing the title, scale, and symbols on that? Would make it more readable and probably improve the overall aesthetic (IMHO).

    BTW...thanks a million for your tips on creating ruins....gonna try some of your techniques the next time I get a chance.
    *Most of my Maps can be seen in full resolution on my blog*

    *I've made some of my maps into full adventures available for download at DriveThruRPG.com or Paizo.com

    This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License unless stated otherwise in the thread.

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