Canyon Lands - Top Down

[Chashio]

That is looking fantastic, snodsy!

[snodsy]

Thanks guys, Mouse, maybe I'll change it up some and have areas where indeed it is 20' and other softer, thanks for the input, lots to do, having fun!

[mat_r]

Very cool! Love the depth, the colors and especially the shadows!

[snodsy]

Here's an update, just adding stuff. Comments welcome.

[HadrianVI]

Wow, this looks really amazing. Great work.

Thanks Hadrian, just so you know I just did a tutorial on this style, you can find it Tutorials or on my page under "started threads" Look forward to seeing your work.

Thank you for the hint. I'll look into it But since I am mostly using CC3+ I will probably not be able to use all of the described techniques but will have to adapt them to what CC3 can do.

[Voolf]

It is progressing very well snodsy

[Mouse]

Very cool, Snodsy

Hadrian - I did relief shading in CC3 on Merelan City. For that I used 2 sheets (for two depths of shading). The paler shading had a blur of 20, and a multiply blend mode effect set at 12.5% opacity. I drew the entire extent of the shaded area with the freehand drawing tool and converted the paths to polygons filled with plain black colour. The second sheet was set up exactly the same way, but because the polygons I drew on that one lay on top of the darkest areas, which had been covered by the polygons on the first sheet once already, the shade was deepened in the areas picked out on the second sheet.

You might need to adjust the blur factor depending on the size of the map so that the shading doesn't look to sharp-edged anywhere, but it works just as well as using layers in GIMP or PS. There is only a very slight disadvantage, in that you only have as many shades of grey as the number of sheets you set up. If I had wanted or needed more than just 2 shade levels on the city map, I would have added another sheet, and set all of them up to about 8% opacity on the blend mode. The fortunate thing is, though, that unless you have great tracts of nothing, the human eye will do a lot of the work for you. Two sheets was enough for a busy city scene

EDIT: and if you do need a sharp edge on part of the shading (for example at the sharp edge of a ridge), there's always the colour key effect. That works fine with these effects as long as you do it after the blur effect in the list of sheet effects

Sorry Snodsy! That took more explaining than I was intending!