Ongoing project to map...everything.

[Askren]

I appreciate the comments. I've got a lot of projects on my desk right now, but my game load has dropped so really I'm just in a process of trying new things and seeing what techniques work.

What are you using? Your maps look gorgeous.

Photoshop, that's all. Actually, a lot of what I do can be narrowed down to a few really basic techniques. They're not great, but they do the job. And thanks.

Here's something I decided to take a swing at because I might be taking a new run at Curse of the Crimson Throne:

Fishery map, 1st Floor.


Still a huge WIP, but as you can see, there is a lot of wood going on here, from the boat to the building to the walkways, etc. I'm kind having to pull out everything I have so I can sell all of that wood. The problem is it becomes very difficult to see. This is supposed to be a filthy, grimy, run-down dock warehouse making fish sludge, with a broken-down old boat out back. I'll be dirtying up the place as I go along.

You have no idea how hard it is to find useful pictures of piles of dead fish and guts. Seriously, it's hard.

[madcowchef]

Good pictures of piles of a lot of things are hard they tend to have weird lighting when you do find them, and no one take hi resolution pictures of piles of fish guts, corn husks, or whatever else. The unevenness of the wood work is really selling it for me as far as run down, and I think your varied wood textures are doing a fine job of keeping it distinct as to what's what. The liquid tank next to the gut pile doesn't look overly liquid to me (I thought it was a table till closer inspection), maybe put a ripple filter on the wood base of the tank and increase the opacity of the liquid were its deepest?

[Askren]

Yeah, the big vat isn't supposed to be filled with liquid, it's supposed to be like the smaller square vat, filled with guts and seaweed and junk, the water is just an overlay. But I wasn't gonna do work on it until I get the actual nasty piles right. Also wanted to re-do it so the planks on the side are angled inwards rather than straight up and down. It'll look better once I get around to really working on it, I just have to figure out how I want to get it looking right.

That's another problem, I'm currently trying to make from scratch bits of seaweed and stuff to spread over the floors and stuff. It's not simple work. I've also been having a huge time coming up with a solution for making the wood floors and stuff look wet and slick with fish slime and water.

[madcowchef]

For standing water or slime try using a funky shaped brush, will the fill turned way down (5% or so), and then add a bevel of a couple of pixels wide making sure the highlight mode is screen. Then turn the angle of the light for the bevel way up (70-80 degrees) a bit of texture to the bevel helps too. Finally you can add a dark glow around it to help define the edges. Not sure it it will meet your needs and certainly won't meet all of them but might be fun for patches at least.

[Askren]

Yeah, the actual liquid is easy, it's a technique I've used for water and blood puddles before and may do in some capacity. I'm specifically talking about like, taking a normal wood texture such as those crates there, and making it look like it's actually wet and slick.

Like, some dark brown patches on Color Burn with low opacity help a bit, but the don't really sell the slick look that comes with wet wood. Like I said, working on it, haven't solved it yet.

[Jacktannery]

I love that fishery Asken - great work.

[Askren]

Always appreciate the kind words, guys. I'm still working on the Fishery, right now I'm focused on dirtying up the work floor by draping seaweed over everything and covering the floor with it, but also building the second half of the map with the ship's interior, which is more difficult than I expected. But good practice because I have a map coming up that's gonna need lots of ship-building.

Anyway, here's something I threw together over the last day or so. I'm still working on the mud and fences and stuff, but I'm happy with some of the progress.



I've also noticed that more and more, instead of using pre-existing objects from around the internet, and using them as bases to re-build those objects with my own textures and stuff.

EDIT:
Also, some progress on the Fishery, replaced the older version. I think I may need this to be useable by tonight, so let's hope I can bust out that last details for this half today. Crunch time!

[the$im]

The fishery so far makes for an eerie piece of scenery. Looking forward to see the final result :>

[Kennyt]

ooooh love the fishery! very nice!

[Askren]

It's been a while without update, because my game schedule kinda slowed down, and sickness and work kinda cut into my schedule of free time.

But, here's what's I've gotten (mostly) finished recently;



Just some updated maps for my use in my current Runelords game. I may eventually get around to doing the outer areas and upper floors (one of which I built, but it was at half-resolution, so I may do it again in a useful ratio), but at the moment I have other things to get done. Also, there's no doors because I add those in Roll20.

And this is a snippet of something I'm working at, which kind of represents a bunch of somethings.


A lot of my upcoming maps feature pretty extensive underground/cave sections, and I've really been working on improving how I can make my natural cave areas look better. Also, my mud is an ongoing project.