Intel Dump - Rumors and glimpses of stuff coming up

[GJK]

My adaptation of Dean Essig's "None but Heroes".  Work in progress map that I'll print and use for miniatures.  Thought I'd share....

[Ubercat]

That looks awesome, Gary. What are you using?

[GJK]

Thanks!  Just Photoshop (CS6).  It's very "wedding cake" layered right now which I'll probably soften up a good bit.  I don't want to lose the birds eye perspective of being able to easily distinguish the rolling hills though.  Right now however they look like mountains and caverns.  What I'll do is hand shade light/dark to sort of flatten out the layers a bit.

[Ubercat]

I actually took a PS class a few years back and did fairly well. I have no idea how to do what you've done, though.  :'(

[LongBlade]

Photoshop is impressive - but first I thought you'd managed to cut that out of some kind of stryrofoam and had made it truly 3D.

[eyebiter]

As in 3d print an entire flat board game map?

[bbmike]

As in 3d print an entire flat board game map?

That's what I thought I was looking at.

[Staggerwing]

Gary is just really good with PS.  O0

Where did you get the trees texture from? Was it a hi-res photo you masked/cut out sections from and then worked the edges or is it some kind of procedural generated texture? I didn't spot any repeats in the pattern.

[GJK]

Nah - anybody can spend a little time with PS and become good enough to come up with some pretty neat looking stuff.  There's so many tools and filters and things that you can do; it's an amazing program.  I self-taught myself PS a dozen years or so ago and it's just really relaxing for me.  I can't paint worth a crap (miniatures) so this takes the place of it.

With this game, I took Dean Essig's original map for "None But Heroes":




And traced all of the contours and saved each onto it's own layer.  I then "wedding caked" it (bevel, drop shadow, standard PS stuff that anybody can spot a mile away but still looks cool):









And I wanted to make it look like the satellite view from Google Earth:





While retaining the levels.  I sampled the terrain that is there- the woods, the fields, and the water.  I'll have to come up with something for the cornfields as they were not in season when Google Earth took their pics but they were during the battle.  Anyways, I've come up with what I posted above:




What I'd like to do is make a ZunTzu module for playing miniatures on it.  I started to tinker with an early version of the map and just the counters from the NbH game:




I could even print it out and make a game mat out of it for actually playing with 10mm mini's.  The scale is 1"=110yds.


That's all there is to it (so far)!  :)

[Staggerwing]

What's the least expensive (I.E. oldest) version of PS that still lets you use most of the macros and plugins and whatnot? I've tried using GIMP but I find that it is hard to learn to use. I also have a decade-or-more-old version of Paint Shop Pro somewhere but I'm sure that it has been left in the dust by PS by now.

[GJK]

I used Photoshop 7 for the longest time up until very recently.  I had it tweaked out just the way that I liked it and it worked fine.  I've since upgraded to CS6 which is still old but very functional (and faster than PS7).  Do some Google-Fu but Adobe was giving away CS2 suite, which includes Illustrator, for free for a while (and may still be).  There may be some gray area with that; I think technically you're supposed to have a license, but the download for it included a free license key so I dunno.  I downloaded it back then and I used it when I transitioned from PS7 to CS6.   Here's an old article about it:  http://www.redmondpie.com/download-adobe-photoshop-cs2-for-free-legally-while-you-still-can/

[Staggerwing]

Thanks again Gary! I've managed to D/L and install CS2 from your links. I'll have to explore it a bit more in the coming days.

[GJK]

Excellent!  I'm glad that those are still available.  CS2 is a solid version.  I didn't notice too much difference between it and CS6 to be honest. 

There's a gazillion Youtube video's on doing photoshop stuff.  See if you can find some basic ones to begin with; ones that introduce the various tools that are available and what they do.  Then explore the filters that are built in and then learn things like adding patterns, creating paths and working with brushes, including how to make your own.  Once you have that stuff down, you'll be well on your way and can explore some advanced techniques.  If you're like me, you'll first kinda fudge your way around and figure out how to do the things you want but eventually you'll learn that there is probably a much simpler way to achieve the same effect.  You probably know this from PSP but layers are your friend.  I put *everything* on its own layer, even strokes and fills in case I change my mind later- I can change the stroke or the fill without having to redraw the area that they apply to or worrying about what a change would do to the original area.

Oh, and Lynda.com has a bunch of free tutorials and 1000's more if you sign up:  http://www.lynda.com/Photoshop-tutorials/279-0.html

[Staggerwing]

TBH, working with properly layers is probably one of the first things I need to learn how to do. Even in PSP I had a hard time getting things to click. Lots of tutorials are just what the doctor ordered.  O0

Between this and getting more into home 3D printing I should be busy all winter.  :))

[bayonetbrant]

Taking the Photoshop discussion to its own thread.

http://grogheads.com/forums/index.php?topic=14635