Settlement Maps (updated - abandoned house map)

[teknohippy]

I really like your mapping style there Kris. They have that shiney, sexy look that Christopher West's work for Dungeon has.

I've just switched to Photoshop myself after years of using CC2.

I've never been happy with the often flat look of CC2 and the fact that it's a sod to use. Well I use PS for a living so I thought I'd give that a go and see if I could develop my original hand-drawn style from the old school days into something a bit more modern and refined looking. I'm lucky enough to have a decent Intuos tablet and a copy of Photoshop so off I went.

The look you're getting is just the kind of look I'm trying to achieve, I just started this weekend experimenting with a photoshop based water effect, which looking at your maps seems to be done in a similar way to yourself.

I almost happy with it

http://www.teknohippy.com/junk/smallmap.jpg

I've now started on redoing one of my old city maps from a long running campaign in this new found Photoshop world of wonders. Just finished laying out all the land, adding the water effect and giving the land a sense of relief.

http://www.teknohippy.com/junk/portjonna.jpg

That's quite zoomed out, about 20% I'm actually doing it A5 size. Photoshop's getting slower with each new layer!

I'd be interested to know what you think.

 

[LORDVOLDEMORT_UK]

Grass & road texture

Hi Kris,
may I ask if you explain step by step how you came up with your fantastic grass & road texture, in Photoshop?

I can't seem to come up with anything like it?

Simon

 

[LORDVOLDEMORT_UK]

Hi teknohippy,

How have you done the water effect and give your land a sense of relief?

Please explain in Photoshop methods?

Simon

 

[teknohippy]

The water effect took me ages and as it's an almost direct rip-off of the water effect Christopher West uses which he considers one of his trade secrets so I'm not entirely comfortable doing a step by step for that, it took quite a while to get it looking exactly the way I wanted, have a look through the distort filters in photoshop and see if anything stands out as being useful , once you've found the right filter have a play and see if you can come up with your own method that suits your exact needs.

The relief on the grass texture is simply judicious use of dodge and burn.

 

[Kris]

Hello all - sorry for the late reply

Anyway - teknohippy...
...those maps look pretty cool the water effect is especially nice. I also like the way you have drawn the sand... though the bevel effect on the three highest levels (of the grass areas) looks a bit harsh for my own personal tastes - unless they are maybe man-made defensive structures (not that I can do any better... 'cause I got a similar effect on something I tried ).

I have never used any of 'CC' software packages, so I can't really comment on it, but photoshop seems to be pretty cool for these kind of maps (though I think I have done my own original images a bit to big - as they take an age to load or save ).

I look forward to seeing more of your stuff - especially that city map finished


And LORDVOLDEMORT...
...I'll see if I can get a basic outline of what I do (to get the grass texture) written up soon