Convert drone pics to Battle maps

[annarobinson]

Hello, so I'm a dm for a group of people and I live worldbuilding, and am currently putting together my new world. As part of this I've started making battlemaps, however I also have a drone, so would love to take some photos of real life stuff and transplant them into my world.

What is the best way to do this, yet keep a dunjinni/battlemap feel?

I just feel they'd be too photo realistic. I guess this is actually about asset creation.

All help/tutorials welcome

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[Redrobes]

You can convert your drone footage into 3D and then use that as a base to get something like Blender to render out some terrain with different texture style than the photos. Making the 3D terrain is normally hard but its easier with a drone so that is an advantage. Then draping the texture on top means you dont need as much artistic ability with the texture as some of the effort will be done by the computer with the 3D effects.

If your able to get drone footage around buildings which already look old then you can then convert them into assets that would sit into a fantasy art piece. You can also use top down footage for modern maps when you have a huge advantage. Getting shots of cars and stuff top down is quite hard but dead easy with a drone.

[Anna Robinson]

You can convert your drone footage into 3D and then use that as a base to get something like Blender to render out some terrain with different texture style than the photos. Making the 3D terrain is normally hard but its easier with a drone so that is an advantage. Then draping the texture on top means you dont need as much artistic ability with the texture as some of the effort will be done by the computer with the 3D effects.

If your able to get drone footage around buildings which already look old then you can then convert them into assets that would sit into a fantasy art piece. You can also use top down footage for modern maps when you have a huge advantage. Getting shots of cars and stuff top down is quite hard but dead easy with a drone.

Yeah it would usually be the assets I go for, I have a lovely ruined house near me which i want to grab, but I don't really know much about how i go about making it look like an 'asset'. Is there a process/filter that most things get thrown thorugh before used in stuff like that?

[RobA]

Ideally, you want to shoot straight down from as high as possible with maximum (optical) zoom. That will give you the least distortion or parallax.

Shoot the image wit the least compression possible to minimize jpeg artifacts.

Pick a day that is bright but overcast to avoid dark shadows.

Rotate the image to the orientation you want, and correct and perspective distortion as needed.

To match the dundjinni style assets you want to extract from the background which can be made easier if you have an object that has high contrast from the background. Snow on the ground can work well if the object isn't too white.

If the asset is physically you can make your life easy if you can drape the ground with something of a weird colour - say by picking up a bunch of cheap purple plastic table clothes from a dollar store or poundland equivalent. Again, an overcast day near noon works best for this. Otherwise take your time with a mask and a fine brush, or a pen tool to mask around the object.

Then scale it as per the Dundjinni scale (200px = 5 foot)

Now boost the colour saturation a bit, and do an s-curve adjustment on the levels to make it look a but unnatural, and then sharpen the image with a fairly aggressive un-sharp mask.

Once the item is isolated from the background, you will want want to add a black shadow/blur uniformly under it, and may need to play with an overlay layer to improve the depth look of the object.

Here is an example from https://photographylife.com/landscap...phy-in-iceland where I followed these steps to get the bridge.



-Rob A>