Ramparts

[adminwheel3]

I needed some partial ramparts for my game and cobbled together the following. The art assets have all been tweaked to a greater or lesser extent from their sources. The ground cover is from Lord TseTse works the the flooring from Skeleton Key. The walls are just straight photoshop. I used some of Dr.Zeuss' base styles and modified as needed.

My biggest challenge was getting the shadows to mesh up. It's still not right, but close enough for jazz. Each tower has its own drop shadow, as does the main wall and the merlons and where they met they didn't blend well. I ended up having to merge all my layers and then use the patch tool to minimize the overlapping lines.

I'm using photoshop CS5 and its new spot healing tool is crazy good. Especially with landscape that is mottled to begin with, it does a great job at eliminating unwanted trees and shrubs and filling in the replacement space with snow and such.

[Zeus]

Very nice adminwheel3, good job.

Check out the new 'Content Aware' Fill in CS5, its excellent for removing regions of images and replacing them intelligently with fills generated from the remainder of the image. I use it to get rid of unwanted elements very quickly.

[adminwheel3]

Good grief! - I thought the healing brush tool WAS the content aware fill for CS5.

I tested it on another map I made which had a river and a bridge right through the middle. This was the map I used as the base layer for my rampart, and I spent a good hour eliminating the river, the bridge and the riverbank and blending everything.

With content aware fill - I used the lasso selection tool, selected just the river and the bridge (because I also wanted to see what effect the road would have)...and the second image is what I got.

HOLY COW!

It basically created a new map for me in about 10 seconds.

Mind...blown.

Ok, so all you map makers out there...if you can beg, borrow or steal enough money for Photoshop CS5 it will save you literally dozens of hours of work. A good way to get a copy is at a college student store, where it sells for a couple hundred dollars.

[Zeus]

Glad you found it, content aware fill functionality in CS5 pretty much gives you a way of creating infinite permutations from existing images. Very useful.

The healing brush is really there for eliminating blemishes from photos, its an automated air brushing tool used in many publications for removing unwanted blemishes from a models skin.

I'll second the thumbs up for CS5, then again I think most users here now I am a big Adobe fan.