Graphics Tutorial by Sauffaus

[thepenguin]

how do these look?

[UpperKEES]

@ ThePenguin: I've now asked you several times in chat: stop posting bullsh*t in map comments and useful topics. When you still continue I'm sure you do this on purpose.

working 1:1 is pain in the ass... to small

My solution to this is to temporarily adjust my screen resolution (from 1920x1080 to 1280x720) when I work on a CW map, as the map editor doesn't resize.

[MadMag]

Faster to edit that in PS.

[UpperKEES]

Well, the nice thing about adjusting your screen resolution is that every application on your screen will be larger in a lower resolution. ;) Besides that you can't edit the map itself in PS....

[UpperKEES]

I've been playing around with graphics myself lately and found you can do everything you need with GIMP (free!), so no need for PhotoShop or other expensive programs.

As an example I changed this map:



into this one:



Use of various terrain textures like Sauffaus and MadMag did is also possible, as I will show in my future maps.

You have to be willing to spend some time reading and learning how to apply the wide variety of possible operations and the order in which you use them though. This will probably take a few days. After that the graphics of your first map will most likely cost a few hours, but you'll be able to work faster with the next ones after gaining some experience.

[Kamron3]

I see birds... am I supposed to see birds?

[ontheworld]

I see birds... am I supposed to see birds?

It's based on the painting 'birds' by Escher, so yeah, you are :)

[UpperKEES]

Not bad! You are begining to get "my" soft edges on the map :)

Oh, sorry MadMag, I completely overlooked your comment previously.

Yeah, there are still a lot of things I like to improve. A few of them are:

1. Blending various textures with each other. I guess I have to use 'soft' selections for that with partially transparent borders?
2. Getting rid of some very dark pixels after applying custom shading / 3D effects, like you can see at the bottom side of the higher terrain levels of the second screenshot above. I probably have to use soft selections for that as well?
3. I have some problems with rounded edges in combination with 3D effects. When I merge the layers you actually want to let the top layers to overlap the lower ones, so the transitions between the different elevations look better. When they don't overlap you would see the edge of i.e. elevation 4 first go down and then suddenly up to elevation 5. My solution is to grow (extend) all non-transparent parts with for instance 3 to 5 pixels. This looks very nice, but leads to problems in one case: narrow passages and tiny details of lower elevations almost disappear. How do you guys solve this?

Any help/advise is kindly appreciated! :)

Edit:

Make 6 separate screendumps from the editor:
One dump from each of the 5 elevations (without borders) + a dump of just the borders.

What do you use the border dump for? I used an outline selection (that I store separately as a channel) for each layer, but I can image that I'm missing something.

[MapMaster]

I used the map template to create custom graphics with GIMP. It workds pretty well, but you have t remember to save them as a .png file, not an .xlf, or it won't work (As far as I know).

[Neko187]

@ ThePenguin: I've now asked you several times in chat: stop posting bullsh*t in map comments and useful topics. When you still continue I'm sure you do this on purpose.

working 1:1 is pain in the ass... to small

My solution to this is to temporarily adjust my screen resolution (from 1920x1080 to 1280x720) when I work on a CW map, as the map editor doesn't resize.

well that escalated quickly.

on another note, I've been able to draft my dad into helping me learn how to do this stuff... he's a landscape architect and as such does a lot of this stuff :)