Friday, April 17, 2009

Spelunking 101

I'm getting the hang of using Photoshop and Dungeon Crafter together to come up with some pretty nifty maps. Even crazy cave systems are turning out OK with a little bit of patience.


I'd be a dirty, rotten liar if I said I didn't miss nice, straight dungeon corridors and rooms, however.

6 comments:

Matthew Slepin said...

So far, I'm finding that drawing the maps by hand, then scanning them, and tracing in Illustrator works best for me. I just can't draw a map on the computer. But that's me. Yours looks good.

Matthew McGee said...

That looks absolutely fantastic - if you ever feel like writing up a "tutorial" post, I think it would be much appreciated!

Michael Curtis said...

So far, I'm finding that drawing the maps by hand, then scanning them, and tracing in Illustrator works best for me. I just can't draw a map on the computer.I always draw out my maps by hand on a standard piece of graph paper. Just lately I've been looking at ways to create them on the computer. My tools are limited to Photoshop and now Dungeon Crafter, and since I don't have a stylus, I have to do all the freehand drawing in Photoshop with the mouse. It's not too bad, so long as I have the map bumped up to around 300-400% and use the pencil tool set to 1 pixel. And patience. Lots and lots of patience...

Michael Curtis said...

That looks absolutely fantastic - if you ever feel like writing up a "tutorial" post, I think it would be much appreciated!I might do so one day. Right now, I'm still trying to teach myself and a lot of the results are achieved after blindly trying new techniques. Often, I don't even remember how I managed to do what I did after it's all done!

Matt Finch said...

Are you using Fingolwyn's cave sets? They allow you to do more of it with tiles, and thus require much less photoshopping. They're on the free downloads page at swordsandwizardry.com.

Michael Curtis said...

Are you using Fingolwyn's cave sets? They allow you to do more of it with tiles, and thus require much less photoshopping.Fingolwyn's tiles were very isntructional. I broke those down in Photoshop to see how they were put together. The tiles work very will when your using DC to create a dungeon from scratch.

When you already have a map in hand that needs to be converted, it's much more difficult to select and rotate the tiles to replicate the map than it is to just draw outline of the tunnels and cave, then fill the extraneous spaces. It's actually faster. But I would recommend Fingolwyn's tiles if someone wanted to use DC from the very beginning of the design process and not to replicate an existing map.