[Award Winner] Battlemaps in Photoshop

[madcowchef]

Stone Magic: Inscriptions and glowy bits.
We decided that those walls at the top of the hill are from a magic tower that clearly suffered one of those frequent magical accidents so we are going to add some more magical stone work.
-first we draw in a stone circle on our stone work layer, roughing up the edges with our funky brush like we did before.


-We have an image with appropriate permissions for our use of some magic symbol, in this case a protective pentagram we want to use so we copy it on over.

-Add it to the stack with the other clipping masks on our stone work layer ctr+alt+g
-Place it above our brick line layer
-Ctr+E to merge down


We know have an inscribed stone, fancy. But we decide that isn’t quite what we want, we need something more glowy and magicy! We want the inscription but we need it to glow so we want it on its own layer.
-Ctr+Z to unmerge
-move it to the top of your layer clipping mask stack
-Ctr+Alt+G removes it from your layer clipping mask stack.
-Select your brick line layer
-Right click on the Fx symbol in the layer Tab⇨copy layer style
-Select your pentagram layer right click on the far right side⇨paste layer style.

-Back to where we started, but now its time to add some glow. We want to to be blue so we’ll do a color overlay, we want some inner glow for the bright center part, and we want some outer glow to light up the area with fancy blue glowing light. Here’s the settings I chose:

-go back to the damage layer and use our funky brush to damage the edges of the stone circle just like we did the walls.

That glow looks like it should be banishing more shadows, we can do that.
-select your master shadow layer
-with a big soft brush well just delete some of the shadows around the circle (I had to use the select tool to show how big a soft brush I was using)


Now we have a flat circle of protection as a slab, but what if we want some obelisk? We could search for a map element that looks like what we want, but lets just make our own.
-Select your stone work layer
-select a square and use the paint bucket to fill it with white (optionally with white selected as your background color you can just hit delete)


-Select your funky brush
-select black as your foreground color (in case you’ve forgotten hitting D will bring back black and white as your default colors and you can hit X to switch between them)
-Rough up the outside to make the square look imperfect.
-Now on the Shadow and highlight template draw in your light and shadow on it. The top part of the image shows my plan of how the light will fall


Not bad but not deep enough a shadow for what we want. Lets use the same method we used on the cliff to deepen it.
-Create a new layer
-Ctr+Alt+G to create a layer clipping mask
-We could go to Fx in the layer tab and copy the layer style for the extra shadows on the cliff, by right clicking, or just set the layer style to multiply, and take opacity down to 22%.
-Select a soft brush
-Draw some more shadows


We want some fancy glowing script on this one too.
-Select your glow layer (the same one you used for your glowing protective circle
-With a small hard brush make some squiggles on the side of your pillar

Lookin’ good, lets just add shadows the same way we did for making our walls by drawing them in on our master shadow layer, then we will use the eraser to remove them closest to our glowing script, same as we did for our magic circle.


We could leave it at that and have some pretty fancy stuff, but lets get extra fancy and pick up the glow on the vertical surfaces near our glowing objects.
-hold down Ctr while clicking on the layer mask for your stone work. this will select only the active parts of your layer mask (the white visible stuff). This assures we don’t draw on the wrong part
-Chose the color of your glowing magic stuff for your foreground color.
-select your master highlight layer.
-select a soft brush
-turn brush opacity to 30% (you can just hit 3 on your keyboard to do this)
-Draw a bit of blue glow onto the surfaces nearest to the light. It will be subtle but help carry the color and create a convincing illusion of our light sources emitting light.

[ajb47]

I might add more later if people have specific requests.

My only request, after being the one who seems to have nudged you into doing a tutorial or three, would be for trees that don't look like hedges, like in the map I posted in the other thread. Is it simply a matter of picking a certain pattern? Because there are a lot of patterns on CGTextures.com, and really, others that can be found just by doing a google search for seamless tree pattern or tile. And most of those seem great for the overland or regional map forests, but may not be fine for the scale of a battle map.

Now, just because that's my only request doesn't mean I wouldn't like to learn all your secrets.

[ajb47]

Alright, maybe not my only request. Interiors would be useful, too, when you can get to them. I don't mean to sound like, "Gimme more! Gimme more!", but I like the whole learning to fish part (Right? Give a man a fish -- teach a man to fish).

Thanks again for doing this.