Custom Map: The Gorge

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This topic is for discussion of map: The Gorge


Author: Timwi

Desc:
This level features a large gorge which will be flooded with creeper in no time. You start out with no relays, no mortars and no drones; all three are techs that you can collect, but they're just on the other side of the gorge...
Amazing background graphics by Romkyns!

[ThirdParty]

Simple but sweet.  I love the background.

[Kameeru]

Nice background and nice map to play! :)

[UpperKEES]

I haven't played this map (yet), but could you tell us a little bit about how this Romkyns created these graphics? I also like them a lot and when more people would know how to do this many maps could look as great as this one. :)

Edit: typo

[Romkyns]

Glad you like it :)

I created the background in Photoshop, mainly by stitching together a number of images I found using Google, and then erasing bits of them to give the correct shape.

Explaining the whole process would require a number of tutorials in its own right, but the use Photoshop aside here's what the image is composed of.

THE ROCKY PLATEAU

The base is a single rock texture, rotated and copied around at random angles to fill the required area. I then erased the edge with a soft brush to make it blend smoothly.

rocks-step1.jpg

I then added a couple of hue/saturation adjustment layers and painted on the mask, by hand, to isolate the action to specific patches. This adds the brownish patches seen here:

rocks-hue-saturation-layers.jpg

Next up I grabbed a cracked earth texture, made it very faint and slapped a few copies on top of the rocky plateau. Here they are, rendered against white because they are so transparent as to blend almost completely with the checkerboard:

rocks-cracks-against-white.jpg

Here's the same cracked earth texture but with different hue/saturation settings and shaped to be roughly round. In the final version there is an extra hue/sat adjustment layer to make them very dark, the idea being that the emitters "burn" the earth around them:

rocks-emitter-cracks-before-huesat.jpg

And the final plateau with all the layers combined:

rocks-combined.jpg

THE GRASS HOMELAND

Started with a photo of grass, which was replicated a few times to cover enough area and then cut down with soft brushes to give it the correct outline:

grass-initial.jpg

Here's a single rock texture behind the grass layer. It's sticking out through the second hole, but the final image will have another rock layer between the two:

grass-one-rock-pool.jpg

Rock barrier is made of a non-texture image; the original was just a photo of someone standing next to a huge pile of rocks. There are perhaps 10 copies of that image here, in different positions. You can also see some remains of the rocks to the left and right of the barrier, where I didn't fully erase the image (I was looking at the whole composite image while erasing to see where to erase, so I didn't see those patches).

grass-rock-barrier.jpg

THE RIVER BED

Like everything else, this is also made of a whole bunch of replicas of a single photo, but because this is the lowest layer I didn't bother so much with correcting the edges, so the fact that it's made of multiple copies is visible clearly here:

river-bed.jpg

Finally, the river banks - I just created a blank layer, picked a dirty-looking brush and a brown color, and painted over the river banks until they looked about right:

river-banks-dirt.jpg

MISC

I used a transparent layer with the level's outline as an overlay, so that I could see where to place things. Here's a rendering of that before I finished the rock pools and the river banks:

example-with-outline.jpg

The final image was of quite a high-resolution, and totally gorgeous even if I say so :)

gorge-background.jpg

Even though it was a "quick hack" it still took a few hours - perhaps between 2.5 and 3.5.

However the way it ended up looking in the game was so disappointing that I decided not to bother doing this again, since all this detail was lost to nearest neighbour rescaling from a low-res version of the above...

[UpperKEES]

VERY nice, Romkyns! Thank you for explaining this in so much detail! I guess I'll have to play around with Photoshop a little more to be able to apply all used techniques, but it seems possible to anyone willing to spend some time on it. Did you do some kind of graphical education or did you learn by experimenting yourself?

I am also disappointed with the quality of the backgrounds once loaded into the game/map editor (see here), but I think this map still looks great, just like a few others for which their creators (or helping artists) took the time to make a custom background. Hopefully the next game (CW2) will compress the files less (especially when this is not necessary).

[Karsten75]

If you do not have access to photoshop, the FOSS program GIMP has almost all the same functions of PhotoShop at the usual price of Open Source Software - free.  :)

Paint.net is also a good entry-level image manipulator, as is irfanview (one of the oldest on the Internet, but regularly updated and improved).

[UpperKEES]

Thanks. :) Does GIMP also allow you to work in layers? That's something I really miss in IrfanView....

[Karsten75]

Thanks. :) Does GIMP also allow you to work in layers? That's something I really miss in IrfanView....

Yes.

PS. I've asked the mods to move that great tutorial post to a place where it is more readily accessible to all forum visitors.

[knucracker]

I am also disappointed with the quality of the backgrounds once loaded into the game/map editor (see here), but I think this map still looks great, just like a few others for which their creators (or helping artists) took the time to make a custom background. Hopefully the next game (CW2) will compress the files less (especially when this is not necessary).

I'll add this to my list for the final update to CW.  It's a simple thing to change the jpg compression ratio in the map editor.  This will help some.... of course the final resolution is still 700x525 so some detail is just lost in the process of scaling down the image.

[DethbyIT]

Beautiful and very well laid out.
I do wish there had been a warning about having to collect the nano-schematics - had to go back and fight my way up that gorge.  :o

Will definitely have to try this one again.

Thank you for putting it together.

dbit