# Mapping Resources > Tutorials/How-To >  [Award Winner] Step by Step workflow: Saventh-Yhi, City of the Seven Spears

## Hugo Solis

NOTE: All these material is Copyright of Paizo Publishing LLC

Just found this forum and I'm posting this here to descrive its elaboration. I think some people may find interesting to see its process and also to hear a little about client-cartographer cartography.

I'll dig up some of these images and start posting them on the weekend

If you have any specific questions please do ask!

I'm pretty green in these forums -and not a native english speaker- so please bear with me  :Very Happy: 

EDIT: Added the name and "north" sign.

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## Coyotemax

this is one of my favourites of yours..  good thing there's lots of pools in that map, i drool every time i look at it  :Wink:

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## Yandor

This is great, any chance you could give a little advice on how you did your houses?

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## Jaxilon

I really dig the style of this. It's awesome!

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## Hugo Solis

> This is great, any chance you could give a little advice on how you did your houses?


Will do! I'm digging up the images to do so.

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## Clercon

Great map! And all tips you can share will be gladly received.

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## Hugo Solis

here we go these are the first three drafts I made for the editor to choose a layout:

As you can relate with the final map, the chosen draft was #3. Many details were added to this draft after it was selected, then sent back again for approval before detailing it furter.

There was some element mixig with the final draft, taking some of the elements I liked the most from the first two drafts and mixing it into the final and more detailed draft.

BTW, I suppose is OK to post this in here since I feel this is more a step by step development other than a tutorial... I suck at explaining  :Razz:

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## ravells

It's fine to post it here! This is wonderful stuff, please keep going!

BTW, the 'My Cartography gallery' link in your sig seems to be broken.

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## Hugo Solis

> BTW, the 'My Cartography gallery' link in your sig seems to be broken.


Fixed it, thanks!

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## Hugo Solis

Now the final draft turns into sketch.

After I define the general layout of the terrain and place the "landmark" buildings, I start drawing the main roands that connect properly the whole city and then all blocks start falling into place. I like doing "odd" shapes with the block because there's alwas a "big rock" or other topographic feature that prevents straight lines and angles to shape your regular city.

Once I'm happy (and most important, the client is happy) with the sketch, I proceed to trace it digitally, starting again with the main topographic features.

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## Kelron

> this is one of my favourites of yours..  good thing there's lots of pools in that map, i drool every time i look at it


seconded  :Smile:

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## ravells

You so need an inkling! Looks like it would go perfectly with your workflow.

I love your approach and am envious of your artistic skills!

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## Hugo Solis

> You so need an inkling! Looks like it would go perfectly with your workflow.
> 
> I love your approach and am envious of your artistic skills!


Oooh having and Inkling would make me shed a few tears of joy...

Even thou I'm a "digital illustrator", ALL my work is pencil sketched first, I just love the hand-made feeling and having a physical original of my stuff, even if its only a sketch.

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## Hugo Solis

The inking step in this case take quite a long time, mstly for all the topographic leves and the few hundred buildings. I didn't wanted to make too many "copy-paste" buildings but after doing a couple dozen "unique" blocks I dropped the dream of unique buildings and started copy pasting more of the same. I tried to make as many changes as possible on the blocks so that the copy-paste repetition. Even so there a maaany unique buildings around, specially the larger-than-a-house ones.

The building design isn't much at random. You'll see neat two-row aligned clusters of 8-12 square piramid-like buildings near the biggest ziggurats, those are supposed to be military quarters. The sigle row ones that are alike are supposed to be priest quarters. The rest of clustered mixed shaped blocks are the regular homes and business/store buildings. There are many "palaces" around and you'll see those mostly perced on the rock columns on the edges. 

A little "secret" of mine when I furnish a city is to think GM minded. I always try to place buildings as if my players were walking through the city and "living" it, so the city needs to make sense and to have every type of building a real fantasy city would have. In geneal nobody notices this, but it helps me visualize it and helsp me enjoy the process a lot more, kinda like as if I was describing/writting the city as I draw it.

I'll get to the details of the wards in the next post.

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## ravells

This is so cool. It may sound odd but I actually prefer your work in progress images to the final product! Looking forward to the next instalment! Thank you so much for sharing your techniques with us!

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## Ascension

Agree with Ravs.  I think us artsy types always prefer the sketchy steps as that gives us more information than anything else.  Must be something in our brains.

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## NatroN

I'm "artsy" too... and I definitely have something in my brain, it made an odd sound everytime I shake my head lol.
Please Hugo... more!!  :Smile:

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## Hugo Solis

I get anxious before finishing the outlines and I start to lay down the flat colors (not a very patient guy!)

The first thing I do is set the base "mood" on the colors and start dividing the main areas (mountains from water from ground) and setting the main colored features, in this case the parts overrun by jungle (the ligth green), the height variation on the surrounding rocks, which in this case two simple levels (thou there is a third one in there), from darker (highest) to lighter (white) and of course the water in blue, with the deepest parts in darker shades. I should had separated the ground level in heights by color too but I didn't kinda regret it now...



In this next illo you'll see all the outlines completed (a few hundred detailed buildings... MADNESS I tell you!).

And here it comes the dreaded and shameful "3d" effect bevel and emboss (Bad cartographer, BAD!). I think is not 100% bad to use it but it is if you abuse it like I did...

Also you may notice that on the mid height level of the rocks you'll see several heights of effect, and this is still the same layer. This is a simple trick achieved by Ctrl+click on the layer frame (on the layer tab) of the outlines to select them all, and then going into the colored layer with the bevel effect while still having the lines selected and then deleting the selected area on the colored layer, thus erasing the areas of the outlines and creating more contours to be (abused) by the bevel filter. This is easier than coloring each area by hand and far more precise.

You'll also see the different leves of sharpness on the filter depending on the height. The higher, the softer. Buildings and vegetation get the same filter effect. You'lll notice that the vegetation gets a nifty texture effect with the bevel and emboss... I'll get to that laters  :Wink: 

I colored the city's floor darker -thus breaking the darker to lighter height order- to make a nice contrast with the buildings which I made lighter. I could (should?) had done it on a different color but I didn't wanted to expand too much the color palette, specially if some of the buildings were going to be colorful.

95% of this is pretty basic Photoshop stuff, but since this was my first map using (abusing) of these effects, I was kind of doing trial and error here, so all these things I explain are what I "just found out" myself and I'm sharing it as I found it useful. If I'm just ranting stuff everybody knows by now, then just try and ignore my giberish  :Smile:

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## ravells

> And here it comes the dreaded and shameful "3d" effect bevel and emboss  (Bad cartographer, BAD!). I think is not 100% bad to use it but it is if  you abuse it like I did...


This gave me a really good belly laugh!!! Everytime I try and find a lazy way of making a city somehow, somewhere the bevel and emboss creeps into the equation and then I despise myself!

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## Hugo Solis

Now that all outlines are done and the main areas colored, I start adding details a some tweaking to the layer effects to add depth and some sharpness to the mountains.



-I added some "random" green areas around to give it more of an "abandoned jungle city" feeling and added shades of green with a texturized brush. Some of the green areas got clearded to leave open spaces and give a feeling of importance to certain buildings.
-The water got the same texturized brush treatment and got burn/expose to enhance the deep effects.
-The sunken buildings are a whole different layer using under the water layer which has a multiply effect.
-I made the floor brighter to make it more "readable".

At this point everything is plain detailing, so its pretty much ground work...lots of it.

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## Yandor

thats awesome, glad your indulging us with all this, its rather interesting!

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## ravells

I've moved this to the tutorial section. Please rate this tutorial so Hugo can get the tutorial award that this so richly deserves!

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## Hugo Solis

> I've moved this to the tutorial section. Please rate this tutorial so Hugo can get the tutorial award that this so richly deserves!


Oh, that would be most appreciated!  :Very Happy: 

Glad this is beign interesting for you guys! There is not much "technique" here, just a little applied Photoshop and a step by step description, thou when I started doing illo work, I did find this process from other people very educative and I'm glad to share what little I know with whoever may be interested  :Wink:

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## Hugo Solis

Forgot to mention this!

The round buildings are made with vectores on CorelDraw and then exported to Photoshop. The easy way to keep a clean line while doing this is to export to EPS and then open it on Photoshop, this way you'll keep the transparent background.

I'm not a big fan of working lines in Photoshop, so when dealing with vector-like graphics, I always us this option because I work a lot faster in Corel, which compensates for the "trouble" of importing stuff into photoshop. Also working with vectors makes it super easy to leave separated elements to mix n' match and create custom buildings real fast simply by mixing and twaking a few new elements into it. Its also good to leave it blank or in grayscale and color it on Photoshop, this way you keep a more customizable building. Its also very useful to make these buildings into brushes so that you can have them handy (and light!) at all times.

I only did the round buildings with vectors because when I started the map, the whole intention was to do most of the buildings by hand, something that proved not to be very smart time-wise, and the square buildings are not too complicated to do in photoshop, but still a lot easier to do in vectors. I resorted to this tool when I saw time running short.

I should have added this step a few posts back... pardon my messy "how to"

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## arsheesh

Wow, I'm just now having a look at this thread again and so want to do a town map now.  Thanks for sharing your tips and expertise Hugo, it is really appreciated.  Repped and rated.

Cheers,
-Arsheesh

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## Jaxilon

Just catching up again here myself...this is fabulous. I've got a lost city ruins map that's been brewing in my head for a while now but I have been afraid to take it on. Thanks for the workflow examples, it really helps motivate me to want to do mine as well now. Thank you!

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## Hugo Solis

Found the PSD file and decided to break is down further! It was kind of fun to go through the layers seen how I did it, I had a hard time remembering every step of the way  :Smile: 

I'll start from bottom and up, begining with the water. I'm clearing up the rest of the details so that is easier to see part by part and also to help see the whole process clearer.

First having all areas defined, I erase the outline on the floodwd areas to try and make it clearer that the water is on a shallower leve level.


Next, I set a "bottom" texture so that the water does not look so plain. This step could be done in a sigle layer using a mask on the water layer... But I like doing things heavy and complicated and did it on a whole different layer  :Razz: 


Next, I put the sunken buildings, as you see these do not have color and the structures are blured so that it give not just an effect of transparency but also of fading depth. You can see also on the "south" part that there are two open squares, these are the lower level of two pyramids which are half sunked, I had to do it on two levels to get the effect (hardly noticeable, maybe not worth the effort). I also added a darker backgrond shade on the southern part to add a different color to the water on the top so that this looks as a "dirtier" part, since its supposed to be a marsh area.


Next, I add the water layer. This is a single layer with a color fill and all the "effects" are with the burn/expose tool and a texturized brush. This layer IS NOT transparent in order to give depth only in certain areas, where I erased (literally) with the erased set around 15% opacity to control the level of transparency. In some places you can see parts of the lake bottom and in others is not visible. This sets a nice level of depth and gives the sunken buildings a cool uneven level of transparency/depth. You can see here also the color difference in the marsh area (not very nice right now). You can also see that the water isn't necessary cropped to the water outlines, this is because the upper layers will cover these up and you don't need to use time outlining it again.


Next, a simple step, a "screen" layer as a Gradient map to change the whole color of the water layers in a single step and unify the colors of whole thing. 


Finally an extra layer of water levels for "higher" flooded areas, like the damn on the southeast part and the small city area on the west part. This water had to be added on a upper layer order since these will be abode city and mountain layers, which will be added on a higher layer order.


And that's all for water!

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## Hugo Solis

This is starting to look more like a serious "tutorial"  :Very Happy:

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## jfrazierjr

> This is starting to look more like a serious "tutorial"



Yep!!!  You might think about nixing this exact example(since I assume it's licensed/copyright material) and just do a proper tutorial with some original content.... 

On I noticed you said several times about erasing and wonder if I misunderstand or do you just not use layer masks??  and if so, why not?

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## Hugo Solis

> Yep!!!  You might think about nixing this exact example(since I assume it's licensed/copyright material) and just do a proper tutorial with some original content.... 
> 
> On I noticed you said several times about erasing and wonder if I misunderstand or do you just not use layer masks??  and if so, why not?


I'm not sure I understand the Nixing thing, is not OK to do it with copyrighted material? Sadly the only four finished maps I have are copyrighted  :Frown: 

And yes, I do erased those parts and as I mentioned is because (I wasn't all to PS saavy when I did it, that was my very second colore map ever and back then I did do much coloring and layer masks where know but unused for me.

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## mearrin69

I'm requesting that you be banned from the forum. Sorry, man, you're just too good and will soon pass my rep total. Just to make sure the ban sticks, here's some more rep from me!
M

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## jfrazierjr

> I'm not sure I understand the Nixing thing, is not OK to do it with copyrighted material?


Not my call... just saying it's better to be safe than sorry... I doubt anything will come of it at all, but the potential is there since either you don't own the work in question(copyright) or the license terms under which you made it may or may not clearly define what you can do with the work.    If your not worried about it, then just ignore my comment. :Smile:

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## Hugo Solis

> Not my call... just saying it's better to be safe than sorry... I doubt anything will come of it at all, but the potential is there since either you don't own the work in question(copyright) or the license terms under which you made it may or may not clearly define what you can do with the work.    If your not worried about it, then just ignore my comment.


Oh, that would be no problem, as long as I list Paizo's Copyright, that gave me green light to post it  :Smile:

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## Hugo Solis

> I'm requesting that you be banned from the forum. Sorry, man, you're just too good and will soon pass my rep total. Just to make sure the ban sticks, here's some more rep from me!
> M


I don't see that happening anytime soon so I hope I don't have to worry for that Ban Hammer  :Smile: 

Thanks for the Rep!

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## Hugo Solis

Now on to the buildings!

I'm taking the outlines out to make the process is easier to follow.

First, I define/separate the man-made floor from the natural ground. In this case its cobbledstone roads so I put a bit of a texture on the area and the use a basic texturizer photoshop filter (mosaic) to make a bit of a large patter on it and give a little feeling of cobblestone. This pattern could have been a lot smaller (and thus more "realistic") but I think this level of detailñ would had made the picture harder to read, so I left it simple. I added a circular gradient to focus the brighter part in the center and draw the viewer's attention towards it. Last, I exposed some parts of the roads (its layer turned off right now) to show "worn" and highlight the most important parts of the cobblestoned roads. The sunken bits on the west and south are more visible now with the cobblestone separating dirt from structure.


Next, I add main roads, bridges and other non-building structures, like road walls, plazas and such. This is done in a different layer with a different (but similar) color to the cobblestones. The diferent layers serves a big function: to add the dreaded bevel and emboss effect. In this case I think this effect is really good since its very discrete and adds the perfect sence of depth/height to the roads/walls/bridges and is super simple to do.


Next, I outline such non-building structures. This is a small but kinda troublesome step, since this outlines had to be done separated from the other building outlines because these got in the way of selecting and definig building areas. Its not much trouble but it does require a separated layer.


Next, the buildings. I magic wand-select the outside building outlines and then inverse the selection to fill the inside of the building areas. You'll notice the are some huge structures in there, these are huge pyramid-plaza structures I did on a bit unrealistic (maybe not!) size to enhance the main temples sense of "greatness" and to add a bit of multi-hieght leves to the city. This step also creates all monuments and big buildings like the dams and bridges. I gave the whole thing a single color to unify the color palette in the next step when I add indiviual colors for the buildings and also to make this color the base one (to be further explained in the next step). I shaded (burned) some of the buildings in here, specially those that would have an extra level abode to give the a enhanced sense of depth. You can see in this step how the sunken structures are covered and now become two-level buildings.


Once the color base is laid, I proceed to color individual buildings, doing a layer for each color, for this allows me to change specific colors easier if I want to. This was a looooooooong process that could have been faster if I planned the separated coloring on the creation of the outlines, simply doing separated layers for each set of buildings which will be of different color. This would complicate a bit the selecting process for interior filling but speed up the coloring process a lot, thou you need to have a very clear picture in your head of the final city to plan this far ahead.


Now we just turn the outlines layer on and voila! It all makes much more sense  :Smile: 


A final Step was to add a few blocks of sinking buildings on the south. tese are not totally submerged and I tried to do a gradual sinking but I failed miserably and the buildings look all fake. I tuned down their hideous appearance on a later stage. These are an entire separated layer in order to give all transparency effects individually without affecting any other building.


And that's all for buildings. If you have any question please do ask!  :Smile: 

Next: the BEVEL mountains!  :Laughing:

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## Redrobes

Wow - this is just pure gold !

(I thought Id get that in just before the bevel mountains  :Wink:  oh yeah and I will be trying to make than ban stick with my staff of repping in a mo... And a thread vote... )

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## Dain

That's a great tutorial you've got here!
Thanks for sharing, have some rep!

We love it  :Very Happy:

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## Dain

Hey Hugo, it's been a week since your last post.
Come Back!
 :Very Happy: 

Everybody agree, right?  :Question:

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## ravells

Come back Hugo!!!

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## Hugo Solis

Now, the horrible BEVEL Mountains!

I was really excited with these while I was doing them, but a few days after I delivered the map I started to see how fake they looked. This step is rather simple and depends most on smudging and erasing to give the height effects.

First: I set the outlines for different height levels and to make the map easier to read. I added a light shadow to one of this outlines to enhance a little the sense of depth.


Then I color the lower "city" rock level. Some buildings are abode this level. I pay no attention to the inside contour coloring because the next level will cover it up.


Then I added the bevel effect, which is plain and simple. Be careful to check the level of Hardness on the bevel effect so that it looks rock-like. You can always throw a little texture on the effect s that it does not look to plain. I did not added texture because the map is already too complicated and texture on this level would make it harder to read. I also added a shadow on this level for more depth.


Then, color the top level. Simple  :Smile: 


EDIT: I found this images aroud and thought I'd add these to see a better difference between the regular bevel effect and the one I used here:

The first image is the typical bevel filter all soft and plastic. To get a better rocky look you need to use the Sharp Bevel effect and also add a texture to the base color layer. Its also useful to play with the bevel depth to get the height you want on your mountains/hills/rocks. In the second image you can see a harder shadow and light, this is achieved with the depth and sharpen bevel effect.

Now you can see the difference between a normal bevel effect and the one I ended up doing (see below). This was achieved smudging the edges and erasing some parts of the beveled layer. I'll get to do a step by step of this effect later on.

Then, THE HORROR! The plastic bevel mountails. This step has a lot more work than it appears, its composed of three separated layers, sadly, I did not have these separated to show it individually. First, its the plain effect on the base color layer, which BTW has a simple noise texture so that the color did not looked so plain. The bevel effect is Sharp so thatit looks rocky and not too soft. Then the second -and most important layer- is erased and smudged to give all the different height effects. The bevel effect gives a plain straight "depth" level effect, but if you smudge the edge you'll see the level moves with the smudge, the same happens if you erase the inside color with different opacities, that's how I got the different edge levels and the "sink" areas on top. That's a lotta erasing and smudging. This second layer lies on top of the first one which has no smudge because of course the secon layer smudging and erasing leaves it all holed up and without a defined inner edge, so you'll need a "base" layer to fill the erased areas and the smudged ones filled from the second layer. I hope I make myself clear, this could be kinda confusing, I think I'll make another tutorial for this effect.  The third layer is a merging of the first and second one and then multiplied to give a darker look to the first two layers. The bevel effect could achieve a nice contrast by itself. The first layer also has a dropped shadow.


This is all on the mountains. As I said, all of the work is smudging and erasing. The mountains have further work but that's a whole different step.

BTW: Sorry I "dissappeared" for a while, dayjob has been terryfingly busy this week...

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## Dain

> BTW: Sorry I "dissappeared" for a while, dayjob has been terryfingly busy this week...


Thanks for coming back so quickly. It's great to see you really involved in sharing your techniques. Very appreciated  :Wink: 

I think many of us will start to try that out very soon.
Great job!

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## Hugo Solis

Now, Vegetation.

For me, these details are what brings alive a map, thou fantasy maping may not need this kind of details for most of them are/should be potrayed as literal illustrations, unlike this one that looks like an aerial "photography" of the area. In my case I went more for a "video game-like" map, where you can zoom in and actually use the place as the gaming area... Not necesarely bad but not a common approach.

First, I throw the general green shades over the areas to be "forested". This is a jungle city so I'm going for dark lush green. This layer is set with a little transparency so that it does not completely cover the background and get some of it color, thus integrating this layer of vegetation directly with its backgroud. You may notice that the base is also slightly texturized not to make it a plain color (also apparently I added a bit of lights to the rivers in this phase, messy me  :Razz: ).
This vegetation is not supposed to be the actual trees and bushes, more like the foliage and general color/feel of these areas.


Next, I threw in the actual "trees and bushes". Again, I cheated a bit and used a pregenerated brush which pretty much did 90% of the job for me (bad cartographer, BAD!). I think using this kind of brushes isn't entirely "bad" but try and create your own brushes so that your work is original. This brush is you typical random scattering one. This layer ain't transparent like the first one so that it actually covers the background and brings a better sense of depth and actual "3d" vegetation. You can compare the opacity of this layer with the transparency of the previous one and see the difference (and usefulness) between the two of them. 


Next, I added the cursed bevel effect to the layer so that the trees pop up and get some fast n' easy volume. I left this simple step separated so that you could see the HUGE difference between flat trees and "beveled" ones. I think this is an excellent use of this effect and it doesn't actually feels so "plastic" if you throw a slight texture over it.


Last, I added a second color to the vegetation so that it doesn't look so flat. This color "flatness" ain't bad, but you can see how it improves if you throw a second color shade over it. It can work to "separate" areas to hint different kinds of vegetation. Try to go light on this kind of extra shades, for too much can ruin the whole thing. This is a simple transparent layer. Try playing with the transparency/overlay effects on the layers on this one, you can get different kinds of textures/contrast with a few clickings on these.


Again, this is a simple and fast step but I believe this one brings considerable life to the map.

Next: Shading and lighting. I'll wrap this step by step tutorial this monday, it is almost finished already anyways  :Wink:

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## Needamedic

Thanks for this step by step. It is very inspirational.

Repped.

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## Hugo Solis

And finally, another extra step to add "realism" to the map. Harder lights and shadows. This effect is good for 3d maps that are aimed towards "realism", illustration-like maps may not require this effect because illustration is supposed to be 2d. Normally illustration shadows are drawn solid or as consecutive lines, thus making the shadow itself part of the illustration.

Normally is easier to add the shadows first and then light up the map. Is easier to map the light after the shadows are set down, thou with a little prctice its exactly the same in both ways. Remember that darker shadows mean deeper places and also harder edged shadows mean sharper edges.
I'm attaching the past jungle image so that its easier to compare the difference the shadow effect brings on the map.


After the shadows are set, its easier to add the light. Remember that this light are supposed to be added on the taller places as a height effect. Also you can throw some non-edged light with a faded brush on those areas you want to jump up, like the main buildings. If you look closer you'll see some light on the biggest pyramids  :Wink: 


Many of these steps are very "discrete" but the tiny bits of difference they add is what can take a map from nice to great.

If you have any questions, please do ask!  :Smile: 

Well, this is it, I hope you find this step-by-step thread useful!

PS: I added a couple images on the Bevel mountains step (page 4) to make the effects used in there a bit more clear.

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## Immolate

This is a stunning piece of work! My only question is how does one get in or out of the city? I haven't read through all of the text yet, so sorry if that's already been stated.

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## Hugo Solis

This city is supposed to be the Pathfinder's RPG version of El Dorado. Its been "abandoned" for a few hunderd (thousand?) years and it was also build to be secretive, so the official ways in are through caves, mainly on the river entrances at the northwest and southeast. There is no actual visible road in, but one inside the city you can see a couple of may roadways that leat into the mountains.

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## ravells

Ah Hugo...it gives me so much pleasure when people like you turn up here and just blow us away with beautiful techniques! It's been great reading through your tutorial.

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## Hugo Solis

Thanks Ravells.

I never thou I'd do this kind of "tutorial/step-by-step" thread but somehow it poped up very naturally after posting the first sketch of the map. I only wish there would had been more questions but there not much science on how I did this one  :Smile: 

I hope folks find this useful and rate this thread!

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## ravells

I've exercised CL's fiat and have given you a tutorial award for this. It's too good not to.

We need to find a way to encourage people to rate tutorials more than is presently the case.

Congrats!

Ravs

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## Hugo Solis

Thank you very much guys, it is much appreciated  :Smile:

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## Jabberwockxeno

Really like the style on this.

Also, would you be willing to share the tree brush? I can't seem to find any good overhead tree brushes around.

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## Hugo Solis

I'm affraid I don't have it anymore, but IIRC I downloaded over DeviantArt, so you should try your luck there.

Sorry for the uber long time to reply... I've been away for too long now...

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