Reply With QuoteYes, the texture is to small for this size (it's actually at 1000%). I don't like it myself.
That mountain texture is heavily pixellated but despite it, I think its much much better as a map than it was originally. Maybe we can help that resample and get the pixellated effect down a bit and then you have a great map going on.
I am not sure what happened between the old and new but if you have the ability to separate the mountains off then I think that you first must make sure that your working in true color, or 16 million colors, or 24 bit, or 32 bit color - they are all much the same thing. If you have a palleted image then it would cause issues and your paint app would probably either not let you do a nice resample or would choose a useless mode for you without saying. So try to up the color depth to full.
Use bicubic resample if you have the option or bilinear if not. If your really stuck then resize the mountains to double or quadruple the size you need which will be really badly pixellated. Then blur it a lot so that it fixes it and then resize the image back down again to normal size. Once you have an image at higher res than you need looking ok then its rare or hard to botch it from that point. Resampling up is always harder than down sizing.
What did you do to it to change the res ? I don't even know at this point which app your using.
I really should write a comprehensive tut about resampling as theres always a lot of talk about it and a lot of confusion. There are many gotchas and some neat tricks to explain too.
Yes, the texture is to small for this size (it's actually at 1000%). I don't like it myself.
Sure but because its a random kind of texture then we can artificially up the res of this texture with some nifty tricks. Its not that hard. Can you post the original texture without the rest of the map in it ?Originally Posted by Antimon
That would be fantastic, RR. I had actually decided to ask you to do so halfway through reading your post, so I am quite glad that you'd already thought about it.
Bryan Ray, visual effects artist
http://www.bryanray.name
It looks, to me, like a pattern had some lighting effects run on it in photoshop cuz I can see the faux contour lines in the lower left that happens as a result. Easy fix, before running the lighting effects, blur the pattern a bit to reduce the jaggies, then maybe add in some noise at 3% or lower. But also, when a bevel is applied to something transparent it also produces the lines so in that case the pattern would need to be a bump map instead of directly beveled.
Last edited by Ascension; 07-25-2008 at 10:38 PM.
Ok ill do it then. I am from a tech not art background. All the tech bits I know well but I am always in awe on the art side. So ill write up a general tech tut which will cover resampling - both pixel side and color side. All the antialiasing, super-sampling, spatial frequency and noise are all wrapped up together.
I discarded the idea of making the mountains with Photoshop. So I played some time with Bryce and came up with something interesting (the left map). It looks a bit weird though, especially if you zoom in. So I tried to find something more normal but still ineresting and came up with the second map. What do you think about it?
other than a little banding artifacts (more on the first map), I really like BOTH maps. The first one has more rocky texture, but the second one has a more organic feel with the grass/moss covering.... I gave you some rep and I just can't commit to either map at the moment...
My Finished Maps
Works in Progress(or abandoned tests)
My Tutorials:
Explanation of Layer Masks in GIMP
How to create ISO Mountains in GIMP/PS using the Smudge tool
----------------------------------------------------------
Unless otherwise stated by me in the post, all work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 3.0 United States License.
Me too - both are great. Gives me the creepers just looking at either. I mean I feel as though I really really wouldn't want to climb either of them. What a difference. IMO I think the rocks are now the best part of the map and as a whole its a great map and should make for entertaining play in an RPG.
I can see what your saying about the texture of the rock. Its not quite rocky enough and more like rounded cracked stone or something but really it does not make much difference. The atmosphere to the map changes a bit with the green on it. Without it seems harsh and barren and with the green more like Chinese tropical cliffs with all sorts of insects and stuff on steep edges - equally daunting terrain to traverse tho. So I would pick the one closest to the mood your trying to convey with it.
You could leave it there or try to find some texture and art that blends the texture into the flatter lands without just a fade to do it. Some of the houses appear as though perched on the sides of the cliffs. I have found that grassy banks next to cliffs work quite well but in reverse. The eye has a hard time working out which way around the cliff is. I admit that these are hard to find on the net so I am attaching some samples which might be useful. If you can shrink these and blend in near to the bottom and then ensure that your houses are within the grassy region.
Whenever I go near cliffs, bridges and tall stuff I always get the camera out. Its now second nature to snap all sorts of things top down.
I'm all in for the first one. The second one looks like a green slime mold but the first one looks like what I've been shooting for with my hell maps. So now I've gotta redo those to look more like this. Man that first one looks delicious for my demon hunter (except all the green, gotta make myself something like that but with burned grass).
Posting Permissions
