My first map

[kane]

Hi everyone,

I've red some tips and advices here on the forums and over the web and tried to do my first map with Photoshop. I'd appreciate any opinions as what to improve next time, as I'd like to practice more.

The map is a stone dias over a round pit with a stone bridges leading to magic portals - a battlemap for encounter with air elemental.

I used pre-made stone texture from cgtextures.com and dundjinni objects found over the web.

Regards,
Piotr

[vtsimz02]

That's a really cool battlemap man. I like it and it's definitely way better than my first one. I usually use GIMP to do my battlemaps as I find it quicker and easier to use. I use Photoshop to make terrain maps and world maps as well as for some special effects for battlemaps (primarily underwater maps at this point)...but that's just me.

I really like the stone textures you selected to start with. And it looks like you made your own stairs which also looks great if you did. I usually use premade stairs but those look ten times better. Your portals and dias look nice over the pit look nice, I'm guessing you use a low opacity layer to do the effect for the writing and eye (I've used that same circular runes before. As a personal choice I would probably have darkened the pit a little bit more but you convey the drop nicely regardless.

The only thing that looks odd to me is the white around the walls, I'm guessing they are supposed to be walls and you used an inner glow on them which is why it extends around the boarder as well. I've begun to use a slight bevel at the top of my walls. I can't tell if you used shadows near your wall (most likely due to the white), but it would still need to be a bit more distinctive to sell the difference in layers.

[kane]

Thanks, I took your thoughts into consideration and implemented in other maps. Here is Ice Elemental chamber - another map in series of this interplanar chambers my players will face. I think walls look much better when more exposed.



And two previous maps: Water Chamber and Lightning Chamber - I can see progress I guess



And stairs are not mine, this is a simple overlay trick, found here. I think they look really cool.

[vtsimz02]

I really like the textures you used on your latest two, the older ones are nice as well, you have a great grasp of lighting. One last thought which is your beveling process trails around the outside of your image you may want to trim those...if your image is size specific (like for roll20) you could oversize the image then trim it after the beveling process. This is only nit picking of course as it has very little to do with the overall effect.

The stairs are a drop shadow overlay thanks for the link but I actually made one for myself before you linked it

Do keep posting your maps they are really cool!