# Mapmaking Discussion & Philosophy (WIP/Critique) > Virtual Tabletop/Battlemap Mapping >  Hedge Maze

## wdmartin

Here's a hedge maze.  Photoshop with CGtextures material.

Gridless:


100px grid:


50px grid:


It was initially designed for a 100px grid, but I decided I liked 50px better.  It allows more maneuvering room in the narrow lanes.

----------


## Domino44

This looks really good!

----------


## Chick

Very cool!

----------


## Meshon

Wow, really nice! Oh darn, I'm already lost. While I'm finding my way outta here, I might suggest adding a bit of roughness to the edges of the hedge walls? My compliments to the arborist, but it might look more leafy. You could try stroking the transparency selection of the hedge wall layer with a small, jittery, grunge brush. If that doesn't make any sense, let me know  :Smile: 

cheers,
Meshon

----------


## Bogie

Nice maze, I may spring that on my players.

----------


## zeichen

wow I like that a lot. Definitely add some more shading to the interior walls. Those kind of hedges are quite dark. Perhaps add some benches to sit on or other garden sculptures. 

One thing to give it a more natural feel would be to put your texture as a brush and use a rough sided brush. The easiest way would be to use some filters like distort. Or just use some shading effects by masking layers.  A hedge is going to have a lot of tonal variation which is hard to get with just one texture.

----------


## wdmartin

> You could try stroking the transparency selection of the hedge wall layer with a small, jittery, grunge brush.


Oo, that's a good technique!  I never knew you could do that, but I found a tutorial on stroking a path with a brush that was simple enough to adapt to this purpose.

Here are revised maps:

Gridless


50px grid


100px grid


In addition to roughing up the edges of the hedges, I darkened the shadows a good bit, as suggested by zeichen.  The original had 2 shadow layers, like this:

flood-filled #002063
mode: multiply
opacity: 16% for large soft shadows, 32% for sharper, darker shadows near the base of the walls

The revised version has three shadow layers.  The two existing one both got increased by 16% opacity to 32% and 48%, then I added a third shadow layer at 16% opacity and put in some even larger soft shadows.

I forbore to add statuary or benches.  They weren't needed for my game, and anyway that's a fairly easy mod to make if anyone needs such a thing.

----------


## zeichen

that really does look better. I do like Meshons trick for stroking the path. I need to look into that more. It opens up a lot of possibilities and definitely saves production time. 

Using Meshon's cobblestone path technique would be cool in there also. Match the path with cobblestones instead of grass floor would look really cool. 

Really inspirational piece you made. Thanks again for sharing.

----------

