Creating Battle Maps, Part 13 - Staying Grounded

As with the wilderness, it’s best to start at the bottom and work upwards, So: Dirt. But, wait, we already have dirt, don’t we? From way back in Part 2 - Paths in the Grass?

Eh, we can do better.

Dirt underground is often more heavily compacted, constantly damp and has a surface which is less even and more mud-like, particularly in a well trafficed dungeon. We need something darker and danker for underground dirt. 

Before you start, you should create a Photoshop document with all the same considerations and steps that we did before in Part 1 - On The Grid. You also need to give the map a unused buffer area around the outside, just as we did in Part 3 - Water Features. Once again, we'll be using a bevel effect that we don't actually want to be visible around the edge of our map.

Once all that is in place, we can get started.

13.1 - Clouds

Create a new layer and call it "Dirt".

Pick two shades of a suitable groundy brown colour and make one your foreground colour and the other your background - it doesn't matter which is which. I chose #5e5351 and #4c4240 for my two shades. Then, go to the "Filter" menu, select "Render" and then "Clouds".

battlemaps13-1.png

Photoshop's rendered clouds don't look much like clouds, to be honest, but the random, blobby shading it produces is a commonly used start to a lot of Photoshop tutorials. I've seen it as a first step to create fire, lighting, planetary surfaces and, uh, yeah, here's it's going to be dirt.

An important point about Photoshop's clouds is that it creates a pattern that tiles under certain circumstances (which I will get to in a moment). This gives you a choice - you can either create a big map, just fill the entire thing with clouds and not worry about tiling; or you can create a seperate, smaller canvas to create a tileable dirt pattern on and tile the result over your main map when it's complete. Up to you.

To create a tiled cloud pattern, you have to use a canvass which is a square and that has a number of pixels along each side equal to a power of 2. For our purposes, it also needs to be fairly big, so I suggest one of the following dimensions, depending on the DPI of your main map:

  • 512x512
  • 1024x1024
  • 2048x2048
  • 4096x4096
  • 8192x8192

If you're not sure which to go with, 1024x1024 would be my choice here.

13.2 - Dirt

To make the clouds dirt-like, we need to call upon our old friend, Bevel and Emboss. Set up the layer style like so:

The particular texture pattern used here is found under the "Patterns" group.

Some other patterns may also work, so it's worth a try, but I like this one for the aforementioned, compacted, lumpy, damp dirt look.

battlemaps13-5.png

As this is going to be our bottom most layer, no more needs to be done here.

Stay tuned for Part 14 - Flagging Efforts.