Reply With QuoteKid's sandbox, and toys, and playpen! then you can go nuts with the cluttered toys and it would totally fit
This project is really moving itself right along. I have added the start of the "after" picture, which involved creating a golf-course grass texture, adding some maples and an apple tree, and designing a deck texture along with steps, rails and posts, then cluttering the hooey out of it while trying to maintain a sense of taste.
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Kid's sandbox, and toys, and playpen! then you can go nuts with the cluttered toys and it would totally fit
My finished maps
"...sometimes the most efficient way to make something look drawn by hand is to simply draw it by hand..."
You need some berms with flowers and bushes...and maybe some mulch around the trees, maybe a gazebo and garden. Oh, and a pool and hot tub. Looks great so far.
If the radiance of a thousand suns was to burst at once into the sky, that would be like the splendor of the Mighty One...I am become Death, the Shatterer of worlds.
-J. Robert Oppenheimer (father of the atom bomb) alluding to The Bhagavad Gita (Chapter 11, Verse 32)
My Maps ~ My Brushes ~ My Tutorials ~ My Challenge Maps
I love the unicorn feeding under the apple tree.
Let's see, would an elf have garden gnomes? Perhaps one modeled after Leonardo himself?
Maybe a flamingo.. or a lawn jockey? (never understood those things)
My finished maps
"...sometimes the most efficient way to make something look drawn by hand is to simply draw it by hand..."
Rather than upload the entire project, I only made changes to the "after" part of the advertisement, so I'm uploading only that.
I added gravel and mulch planting beds around the front of the house, the trees and the front path. I planted bushes along the path and junipers in the house-side beds. These were made from a nice picture of a large blue-star juniper bush which was carefully separated from the background, then duplicated. I removed the darker spots on the duplicate and then beveled the remaining bush. Once that was right, I merged the two layers for a pleasing result. The bush was scaled to about 30% and then stamped all over the planting bed. I did a light ripple filter on the bushes and then a sprayed stroke, which removed the recognizable patterns without losing the effect. Then I put a hue/saturation filter and a contrast filter. The bushes were the original blue-green color that these bushes are supposed to be, but my wife didn't like it and helped me take them back to a more typical green. I finished them off with a one-pixel high-depth bevel, chisel hard with a six-pixel soften.
The bushes on the path came from the Dunjinni forums. The edging was a pattern made for this purpose by doing light-grey/dark-grey clouds with a few difference clouds added, then a patchwork texture with block size two. I added a pattern adjustment layer to the house file, then used ctrl-i to hide it. I then used the line tool at a width of six pixels to "lay" the edging around the beds. Some bevel and a small amount of drop shadow completed the job.
The gazebo came from RPGMAPSHARE.COM. I was surprised to find one there that was pretty enough, but I did, so I threw on a bevel and customized the gloss contour to give the roof a distinctive oriental flare, then left well-enough alone.
Finally came the statue/fountain (actually first, but I'm telling about it last). I'm not content with the water, but the rest looks good. The fountain was simple enough with a few circles of marble and some bevels applied, but the statue was another matter. First, finding a female elf archer from above was difficult. I knew of one, but she wasn't exactly right so I kept looking. After well over an hour of surfing the web, I gave up and decided to use the one I had.
I used a tutorial for "statuizing" a photo. There are actually a number of tutorials but they all do basically the same thing. Desaturate and then multiply various stone layers onto the image. The only problem is that this method is find for a fundamentally two-dimensional image, but a statue from overhead is very much a three-dimensional thing, and the method yielded unsatisfactory results.
So I thought the problem through, then started separating layers of the archer, starting with her head, then shoulderpads and breasts, then arms and hands, then quiver, with the bottom layer being the whole thing. Each layer I "statuized" separately, then applied a customized bevel to it to achieve the exact amount of roundness appropriate for that part. then I recombined the layers to get the result you see.
I have more to do of course, but I felt it necessary to report back on my progress.
Looking great... darn, this could become another tough vote
Check out my City Designer 3 tutorials. See my fantasy (city) maps in this thread.
Gandwarf has fallen into shadow...
Okey Dokey... here's the full ad, functionally complete. Added Leo and his testimonial. Leo is simply a garden gnome with meerschaum pipe added.
I now have 18 days, give or take, to add things, refine things and polish. Suggestions are most welcome now that everything that has to be in, is in.
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I don't know what happened to my post, I had one in here complementing you on your work so far and saying that your efforts with the statue totally paid off.
Dunno what happened to it, but there you have it. And it's looking very nice! I love the dogs on the porch too
[edit] Oh, spellchecking point - after you comment about the CSI team, there's an "up" that looks like it should be "us", and right before mention of the HAZMAT team, there's "adn" the looks like it should be "and"...
(please don't hit me, i've had enough of that from correcting aslanc lol)
Last edited by Coyotemax; 09-07-2009 at 06:26 PM.
My finished maps
"...sometimes the most efficient way to make something look drawn by hand is to simply draw it by hand..."
CM: nope nope, I appreciate the point. I'd already seen and corrected the "adn" but didn't see the other error. Thanks!
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