Desert Canyon - Dark Sun Battlemaps

[Jacktannery]

Your cheese canyon is awesome but your desert rocks are indeed pretty dire. Why don't you have a look a Neyjour's wonderful desert rocks here RPG Map Elements 32 by *Neyjour on deviantART and try to use her ideas to create rocks that blend in better with the sand.

[Invictys]

Thanks for the feedback Jacktennery! I took your advice and added a version that uses Neyjour's desert rock objects and I have to say it looks much better! I had to use a good amount of drop shadow on them to get the sense of height I was looking for so some of her overlay magic was lost but overall I think it looks nice.

I still would like to find an attractive method to easily draw and texture my own customized rock shapes on a layer instead of relying on object placement. My current method just isn't good enough for a more hi-res looking map they come out looking cartoony.

I'm on a height map kick right now and was thinking of creating a layer, selecting the rock shapes with lasso, pasting in a pretty busy height map background (or find a way to create one inside each selected area using gradients maybe?), then putting a rock texture layer on top of that in multiply blending mode.

This isn't the proper forum obviously but does anyone know of a good realistic rock method with a sense of height?