Dungeon Crawl Map

Another dungeon crawl map.

Step 1. On this one I first rendered the grid using POVRay.  Next I found a photo I had taken of some rocky mountains.  I applied high pass filter to the mountains and then pasted them as a layer on top of the grid.  I applied hard lighting with some transparency to get the desired effect.  I used edit define pattern to make this into a pattern.

Step 2.  I started a new blank image at 2000 x 1500 and filled the background with a 2x2 grid.  I used the rectangle selection tool and the polygon lasso tool to select the entire shape for all of the rooms.  I next inserted a new layer.  I then used the pattern created in step one to fill the entire layer with the grid.  I used Layer Style Settings to add Bevel (down) and Drop Shadow to the layer.  I adjusted the settings to get a nice image.

Step 3.  I put in another darker layer underneath the dungeon layer and applied hard light to the background grid to make it darker.  I then used flatten image before saving the image.

Below are some more tile sets that can be used as patterns.

3D Maze Layout

Next I used the tile set I created to create the rooms for my 3D maze.  This is the first level of the maze I described in a previous blog.  I created a large blank image in Photoshop (4000x3000) That gives me plenty of room to work so long as I don't run out of memory.  Next I used the rectangle and polygonal lasso selection tools too select room areas from the tile set and past them into the new area.  The other way to do this is to make a big selection area and use the tile set as a fill pattern to fill the area with the tile set.  After adding all the areas I made the background invisible and merged all visible into a single layer.  I then set the layer style to have drop shadow and outer bevel.  Finally turned on the background again, merged all layers, added some numbers with drop shadows and saved as a JPEG.

Making More Realistic Tiles

 In a previous blog I described how to make a tile set using POVRay.  To add some realism to the tile set I took a photo of some rocks and a loaded the original tile set into Photoshop.   I added my picture of rocks as a second layer using Photoshop.  I then used the soft light effect to add a more realistic texture to the POVRay generated tiles and adjusted transparency until I got the desired look.

Here is the original tile set:

 This is the picture of rocks I used for the overlay.

More Sketches and Maps from Old Notebooks

The computer I have my scanner attached to is dying so I am not sure how many more of these there will be.  Here are some more scans from old notebooks.  This was supposed to be a haunted region:

 I think the next one was supposed to be for a city of cat folk.

 A mountain village.

 Next are a couple of sketches I made.  A bee.

 Some fish and a prehistoric multipoda fish like amphibious creature.

 A sorcerer:

 And a sorcerer's cloak:

3D Maze Making

In this blog I will describe how to prepare a 3D maze.  The first step is to decide how many levels and rooms to have.  I usually like to start with a rectangular array of some type.  For this example I will use a 3x3x3 array.  This gives 27 "rooms" to the maze or 3 levels with 9 rooms on each level.  I then draw out rectangles representing the rooms.  After laying out the rooms I draw in the connections between the rooms on a given level.  I try to make the connections in an interesting way.  At this point it is OK if all rooms on a level are not connected.

Now that I have the connections on each of the levels I make the up and down connections.  The first thing I notice is room 20 has no connections, so I know I have to connect room 20 to room 11 on level 2.  Next I start with room 1 on level 1 and work through adding up and down connections until all of the rooms are connected somehow.  Now I have made all of my connections, hopefully I did not miss any rooms.

Next I like to do a graph to see how the rooms are connected.

This verifies that I have used all of the rooms.  It also shows the longest path through the maze from 1 to rooms 22 or 12.  I could leave it connected like this but sometimes I like to add a shortcut path.  It would not be easy to connect room 22 to room 1 but I could connect room 12 to room 3 by adding an up/down connection.  The goal room would probably end up as room 21 or room 20 since those have fairly long paths assuming room 1 as the starting point.

Below is the adjusted connection map of the maze.  If I wanted a more tightly connected maze I could also connect rooms 10 and 12 together.

I would probably use room 20 as the goal room due to it being isolated on level three.  If I am going to make this into a dungeon crawl then I just draw in the rooms and connect with hallways and stairs. You have to be careful to make sure all of the up down connections line up.   If I were going to make this into a castle or house I would look for rooms with lots of connections and make those into hallways.   For example rooms 1, 9, 14 and 23 would likely be hallways that open onto several other rooms.

Simple Castle and Wall

In this blog I will describe how to make a simple castle wall with towers.  For this I used Illustrator but other drawing programs should work.  I set snap to grid.  I first made a simple black rectangle as a drawing surface.  I drew another rectangle on top of that and made the lines 4 points and gray.  I copied this rectangle and made a duplicate of it colored a lighter shade of gray.  I made this line dashed by going into stroke->show options then changing it to a dashed line.  I chose the circle shape tool by holding down the square shape tool until it changed to show the options, then chose circle.  I chose the radial gradient pattern then went into edit the gradient.  I clicked on the black square controlling the gradient and changed the color to gray.  The white side I left white.  I then created four gradient filled circles at the corners of the dashed rectangle:

Resulting in the following gray scale image:

Which becomes the following when rendered:

global_settings {max_trace_level 5 ambient_light rgb 1.5 }

background {rgb <1,1,1>}

camera {orthographic location <0,20,-20> look_at <0,0,0> angle 40}

light_source {<80,100,40> rgb .5 }

light_source {<20,200,20> rgb .8 }

    

height_field {

    png "castle.png"

    //smooth 

    translate <-.5,0,-.5>

pigment {

      gradient y       //this is the PATTERN_TYPE

      color_map {

        [0.0  color <.4,.3,.0>] 

        [0.5  color <.5,.4,.6>]         

        [0.9  color <.8,.1,.0>]

      }                     }

    scale <17, 2, 17>

    finish {roughness .1 specular .5 ambient .2}

  }

 plane { y, -1.0 texture {pigment {color rgb <.7,.55,.4>}} translate <0,1.02,0>}

With a bit of tweaking you can get a more complex structure, I also added in some random houses from my previous blog:

POVRay Cartography City

Latest version with beach and city added.