Sure thing, Bogie!
Thanks, everyone!
@TimPaul - I prefer to create hand-drawn maps vs. photo-realistic maps, but then I am writing 2 Map Tutorial Guides that using photo textures, so I need content to fill those guides that are also photo-realistic. Regarding how light works, I've used 3D applications for 10 years - I am very familiar with light dynamics. If I were truly being realistic, with no light source beyond the open doorway, you wouldn't be able to see the statues at all. If I determine the sun is to the southwest of this map, then all my shadows are going that way - it certainly isn't realistic to how the sun actuals exposes surface objects, especially inside a building, but it works for a quick map. I want my map to be as photorealistic as I can, as a quick map - something that will work in a game. That's my only concern, so I'm satisfied with what the light and shadows are doing in the map.
I not trying to create a photo image of ground terrain - I just want to emulate realistic effects, not duplicate reality. First and foremost, this is a map, not a photo. I personally hate when people put clouds in the sky over a regional map with clouds between the viewer and the ground. I don't ever want to create an aerial photo of the ground. I want a map, that has photo-realistic features and effects - but it's still just a map.
As far as the plants go, I have two different leaves of one palm and only one leaf of another - that's all I had to work with in creating these trees, so stretching, resizing, flipping is all I can do to differentiate the leaves I have to work with. Once the tree is put together, all I did was duplicate, flip and rescale. So there's only 2 trees in the map, based on 3 leaves. It looks good enough for working with limited resources.
The grass here is succulent tropical grass - which looks big compared to lawn grass (I've been to the jungle and seen this kind of grass), so I emulated that using standard grass photo.
When I create professional maps for commissions, I almost never use photo-realistic style, preferring hand-drawn work for that. However, I always use bevels (even if that filter doesn't work for you), it works fine for me, and no reason for me to stop using bevels. In fact most of my tutorials in my upcoming guides rely on bevels for much of the work. Different philosophy we have, I guess. Also, since I'm using Xara, there is no 'emboss' only 'bevel'. Nothing in this map was worked on in an image editor, everything is vector here.
GP
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