First battlemap - Sand Raiders from Dark Sun 4e

[Raptori]

The problem with a lot of shadows that I've seen is that they just use the Photoshop drop shadow layer style, which really isn't the right thing. If you move it further from the shape, you can see more closely what it actually does - creates a faded and blurred copy of the layer's outline. I copied the shape of one of your rocks to show an example of this:



In the vast majority of situations, that's not going to look realistic no matter what you do with it. What happens with shadows in real life is more like this:



It's still not exactly right - it assumes the entire rock is of a uniform height, and the gradient from dark to light is linear rather than following the contours of the rock's outline. That last one is the most conspicuous flaw visually. However, it's a lot more realistic than the usual shadows, and doesn't take too much effort. All I did was copy the layer, move it down and to the right, use the polygonal lasso tool to join the new shape's corners to the original one's corners, fill selection with some random colour, apply gradient overlay, set content fill to 0%, and add a gaussian blur. I could screenshot that process at some point if anyone's interested!

Edit: actually, it's even faster to just use the paintbrush, and I think it looks even better than the changed one above...

[reddragonjr]

I could screenshot that process at some point if anyone's interested! ]

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