[Award Winner] Battlemaps in Photoshop

[YourGuts]

Hey madcowchef, thanks so much for this tutorial, it's been a huge help and enabled me to get a foot in the door and start making my own battle maps. With a few extra tidbits from around the web, here's what I've managed so far.



But after stumbling across your Deviantart tiles, your caves really impressed me. And I'd love to know how I'd get started making my own. Any help would be greatly appreciated, thank you.

[madcowchef]

Nicely grungy! I'll see about putting together something on cavern making, but it might be a bit before I have time.

[madcowchef]

You aren't far off really. You textures are a bit close to each other so its hiding the contrast a bit more than it should. I'd try substituting a couple different textures to see if you can find some that show off your work a bit more (you can drag your layer mask right onto a new layer and then just hide the previous one). Picking good textures is a lot of trail and error when you're getting started.

[madrileen]

Thanks for the advice, I'll get right on that!

[Mikael Lidberg]

Amazing tutorial, thnaxs alot for this. Realy inspiring.

[phazed]

I love your textures, is there anyway i could get them? especially that cliff texture.

[kinwolf]

Thanks alot for the tutorial! I do not have access to photoshop so I did it with krita instead, and it was quite a challenge since I have only basic experience with graphic software. From what I saw, there are some important differences btw the photoshop way of doing things and krita ways, but it forced me to experiment with krita and it was a good learning opportunity. So, here is the humble result I got. It still look very rough compared to some others I have seen in this thread, but I think it's a good first try for me


I still need to figure out how to do the shadowing part of the cliff in krita. And I totally cheated on the trees and bushes and used tiles for those

[madcowchef]

Looks great! Experimenting and learning is much more important than following step by step so you got the most important part of it. Looks like a great start to making some fun battle maps for your games.

[Sitrane]

Fantastic tutorial! I have a degree in Video Game Art and Animation but there were a few tips and tricks I picked up that really helped with designing maps. Hopefully I can post a picture of my map I designed soon but it's part of an upcoming Kickstarter, so I have to keep it under wraps.

However, I am running into one major hurdle: What is everyone using to create overhead views of their trees and plants? This is proving to be extremely difficult to create something that looks realistic.

From looking at previous posts, @Kinwolf did a really great job, so I'd love to hear how you made your trees and bushes.

Any advice would be greatly appreciated!

[Lichlark]

Thank you so much for this information! Figured I'd share my first little project!