Area near Sentinel's Shadow

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http://http://barroks-tower.net/forum/album.php?albumid=8&pictureid=22http://i57.photobucket.com/albums/g210/mindforged/Sentinels-Shadow.jpg (http://barroks-tower.net/forum/album.php?albumid=8&pictureid=22)

This is the starting area for my 4th edition campaign starting in a month or so.

It is all vectors so I can enlarge it to any size within illustrator if I want. I have a wall map of this area.

There are a total of 9 maps so far, forming a square. This is the left middle one.

1 2 3
4 5 6
7 8 9

It would be number 4.

There is another larger map that is the size of 2/3 of the 9 maps (pretty big) that covers the water to the west. This is for a pirate campaign I want to run one day. That map is still really rough though.

Area 3, 6, and 9 are very sparse.

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http://i57.photobucket.com/albums/g210/mindforged/Sentinel-Shadow-Area-marks.jpg

Here is the same map with marks on it.

The other maps are not marked up as much. This area alone is packed with enough for my group to probably get to 15th level or so, depending on the XP advancement. The ring is basically all the area I wanted to plan out before the game started.

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The clouds on the southern rim of the crater are from volcanoes that are active.

I used real water in a layer beneath the map. I turned the water layer into a vector so I could edit the edges a little more before flattening. It also makes it easier to edit later.

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http://i57.photobucket.com/albums/g210/mindforged/vector-paint-with-rough-tex.jpg

Here is a really close in version of the crater area. The texture scattering was done in photoshop and once I had most of the image done I used brushes I made for mountain ridgelines to create the mountan terrain lines.

The clouds are vector based with drop shadows at -6.

The texture scattering makes it look horrible up close, but will look great at a distance and create a much better look to your map. You can use the cutout filter in Photoshop CS2 to create the effect that you see here after you have some of your primary sections in. After scattering your color you can probably use an unsharp mask in order to blend them together and make the image slightly darker or brighter.

For my crater I used two colors.. green and tan. I created a brush for the mountain edge using a live traced satellite image of a mountain. I made the brush and a few others, you can look at the image and literally see that only one brush was used to create that edge where the mountain crests.

Yan use the brush palette to create different brush styles from the same brush and create whether the brush follows your angle or stays locked in position. You need to have the brush follow your angle when yo do the mountain edges unless you are just going to move the brush in one direction, as I did in the southern part of the crater. It helps if you have a wacom tablet.

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Also, notice the closed crater in the final close up. That is the way the newer version looks.

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Also, use satallite imagery to capture color if you need to, I use a pantone colormunki (http://www.pantone.com/pages/products/product.aspx?pid=711&ca=2) for everything (if you have an extra $500 laying around get one, they are unbelievable). The color munki can capture any color and every shade of that color and implement a color palette for you that you can load into any program in the Adobe CS3.

I like to create a palette of 8 colors for anything I do. 4 dark colors and 4 light colors. Sometimes, I do more, but never less. With these color and scattering techniques, you can make solid masses of color blend and shade correctly. I like to work in close after making masses of solid color, in order to make maps you will need to make brushes and symbols. Making a symbol of scattered green specs will allow you to evenly (but a little chaotically) disperse across other color. You can then utilize filters to create a textured look.

You can use this color for your stroke lines to create shading instantly. Also, if you understand screen and multiply you can darken entire sides of mountains a darker color just by creating a duplicate layer with multiply, it will just darken that location if you mask it correctly, and it will be perfectly aligned to the mountain because it is just a duplicate image. Make sure you add feathering to create a smooth transition back into the map - so it doesn't look like my swamp does with the hardline.

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http://i57.photobucket.com/albums/g210/mindforged/Crater-9-07.jpg

This was what it looked like after I built my beginning palette and started creating vectors via pen tool and tablet.

You can see where I was going to scatter textures, it wasn't until the end when I added the water layers, the cloud drop shadows, and the more hard edges. I have a few brushes that let me make some pretty broken edges off the stroke, my stroke for this was 3 px and it helped create some pretty jagged organic lines. This part was done in Illustrator. I didn't move into illustrator for awhile and when I did the cloud layer was not transfered. I would add that after I had a better idea of where my photoshop brushwork would end up on the dark green, light green, and tan areas.

Oh yeah, one more thing... you don't always have to have the flow and opacity up on your brushes, when making a map on top of a smart vector layer, you can use about 70% fill and 90% opac to create more organic textures when you start the cutout and filter process.

Plan to spend about 20-40 hours on a map of this size if you are just starting to do this.