Friday 10 June 2016

A try at dungeon tiles

whilst i dont really show off much interms of digital work on this blog. i have actually have a lot of experience under my belt as a texture artist and 3d modeller. its not something i tend to apply too much to this hobby of mine.
graphics these days is something i much prefer to do as a passion. and a way of flexing those creative juices. ive done a few things over at advanced heroquest reforged. the odd overlay and the templates and spellbooks. but never really for much direct creative purposes.

ive never actually delved into making dungeon tiles before so thought i would have a little go at creating a modular tiling photoshop document that i could essentially use to craft quick and easy dungeon tiles that still at least have some cosmetic clout to back them up.

so first of all i realised if i wanted to go the modular route i would need to produce something generic enough that would then be able to  be reused over and over with minimal effort but still be able have a varied look.

so i dug out my heroquest board first and copied a variance of the floor tiles.

these are all made in neutral grey so that a colour overlay can be added to the tile in order to then colour them any colour you want.
once i had enough variationi then created a layer that would enable me to draw cracks anywhere over the tiles and still get a pretty decent look to it.(see the top left tile)finally i applied some huge rocky mountainous images over the entire template with the layers set to 'overlay'. this would then allow each tile to have a varied look to them no matter how they were placed.and i could change these textures to ultimately create infinite rocky texturing to my tiles

so once i had my basis i thought "lets put this to the test" and make some high res copies of older tiles.
first up i decided to grab a AHQ tile. pretty bog standard in look. and apply this template in a hope to succesfully re-create (as well as adding a few more details just to spice them up a little)
so here the original

and heres the reboot (god i hate that term)

turned out pretty good i think for a first attempt. ok its not perfect. but i used this simple reconstruction to help refine my template. adding a border if i wash to create AHQ tiles. as well as a spotlight overlay to create that 'middle of the room' glow. this only uses 2 square variations. all flipped or rotated. the rocky overlays doing the rest of the work to make it all look different and nice and varied. the cracks layer works pretty decent as well. i decided to give it a very slight skaven theme on the middle tile as well as adding a straw next of sorts. this entire tile took me about 20 minutes in total to create..so not bad

so next up i thought..lets try something a little more specific. so i nabbed a warhammer quest tile and once more put my template to the test

so heres the one i chose.

and my second recreation.
again this one turned out pretty good. once more refining my template a little. i got bored doing the skeleton and couldnt be bothered drawing him. after all this was more of an experiment than an actual production. again this only uses 2 squares. each flipped and rotated. and once more those mountain overlays doing pretty nifty work in giving a varied look.

so there we have it. a pretty successful experiment.
with me now having my hands on warhammer quest silver tower. that might give me further impetus to go into full creative mode. who knows. but at least ive got a tool now to create any dungeon i so wish. with relative ease.

3 comments:

  1. I'm VERY excited about the potential here. Looks like you've come up with a great system, and the results speak for themselves.

    It sounds like you're involved in some 3D work, is there a way you could use parts of these files to create an actual 3D tile in resin or something?

    ReplyDelete
  2. this was more of an exercise to see if i could do it in a producible manner on a 2d basis.
    i think creating something like this would need a hella lot of resin and probably wouldnt be that producible. i think if i did do something like this in 3d i would most likely stick to doing it digitally.

    ReplyDelete

Note: only a member of this blog may post a comment.