Background Help

[voo]

First off, welcome to the guild. Secondly, you should post what you have so far so that we can better help you with what you want to accomplish.

Sounds to me like you need to hit the tutorials and hit them hard. Even though you might not find exactly what you're looking for, they will teach you some very important techniques that should point you in the right direction.

If at the end of day you're still stumped, that's what we're here for

[Jarlhen]

Thanks for replying. I've spent all day looking at tutorials and experimenting, have a feeling I'll keep doing it for a long time to come.

So far I have mountains, lakes and other such things. I have a pretty decent idea of what else I need and I'm fairly sure I'll be able to figure all that out. The only thing I can not wrap my mind about is how to make the background texture.

Imagine you have a rather large area, one which would take a couple of days to walk across. All that is city, and all of it's been bombed to pieces, so we're talking ruins. That's what I need help with. I just don't even know where to begin. Mountains aren't too difficult to make, but minor elevations though, I could sure use some tips when it comes to that too. So any ideas on where to start for a background texture and also a nice way to make small elevations like hills and such?

[Ascension]

I don't think that you're going to find large patterns of ruins. The best you might be able to find are patterns of pebbles and cracks and rocks and blricks and such. For elevations, well, darker colors are lower and lighter colors are higher so maybe airbrush in some colors and set the layer to overlay or soft light or something.

It would be most helpful if you could tell us what software you are using and also an example image of what you're aiming for so that we can understand better.

[Kihmbar]

I believe what you are looking to do is a larger scale of what I typically map. That being said, I usually take a concrete texture and "dirty it up" with cracks, mud, debris (bricks, steel, or stone), or other sci-fi effects. In GIMP - I make a base layer and fill it with a concrete texture and then add layers on top of it to get the desired "dirty" effect. [I would normally provide a link to textures, but my computer crashed a few months back and I'm just now getting it back online.]

As has been mentioned before, if you give us a image of what you're trying to do then we can be more specific in how to get your desired look.