Zombie Nirvana Games

Just a quick update; I’ve posted a new map up in the gallery. I created this one in preparation for a light-hearted pirate campaign powered by Risus I’ll be running soon.

Last night, I did some preliminary tests for the podcast. I’ve been stressing over the quality of the video, but the Photoshop videos I’ve seen up on YouTube haven’t been much better, so it could be that I’m just trying too hard. If I decide to try and put it up on iTunes, though, I’ll have to do something about it. If anyone has any suggestions for making high-quality screen video captures, I’d love to hear them!

A few folks asked me how I created the realistic looking paper texture for my Foster’s Meadow and Western Lands maps. Well, here’s how!

The process is really simple, and you can automate it by recording it as an Action in your Actions palette if you like.

1.  In a blank layer, hit D to switch to the default colors (black foreground and white background) if you don’t already have those colors selected already. You can use other colors if you like, but if you’re planning on using your paper texture as a Displacement map later on, B&W works out well because most of your image will end up gray.
2. Go to Filter >  Render > Difference Clouds, then hit Ctrl – F (Option – F on a Mac) to repeat the filter. The more times you use it, the crinklier your paper will end up; three or four is usually plenty.
3. Go to Filter > Stylize > Emboss. You should immediately see that your Difference Clouds suddenly look a lot like a gray sheet of paper! Play with the settings a bit if you like; a Height of 3 or less and an Amount right around 100% seem to be best.

Easy! Once you’ve got a nice paper texture, you can use it as a displacement map, adjust the color, add some stains, whatever you like! I’ll have more on how I do these sorts of things in the book.

Unless there’s a great deal of demand for some other trick between now and then, making and using a cool background texture will probably be the subject of my first Fantasy Cartography podcast.

I’m kind-of sort-of working on my Fantasy Cartography for Adobe Photoshop book now; as I’m working on some maps for other products, I’m taking lots of notes and trying out some different techniques. Here are a few tips and tricks I’ve learned along the way.

1.  Remap your Wacom front click.  (Of course, this is only helpful if you’re using a Wacom tablet, but if you’re not I heartily recommend them. I’ve been using the same one for over five years now; they’re incredibly durable!) One thing I found myself doing constantly while working in Photoshop was hitting the spacebar in order to pan around inside an image. My Wacom stylus has two click functions, and by default they’re set for right-click and double-click. Since I pretty much never right click on anything in Photoshop, I remapped that one to the space bar; it makes drawing and panning much smoother.
2. Tool Presets are your friends. Tool Presets is one of those palettes you might go for years without ever using, but once you discover it you don’t know how you did without it. If you’ve spent more than 10 seconds setting up a custom brush, for instance, or if there are certain tool settings you use over and over again, like a certain font size and style, save it as a Preset.
3. Snapshots are also your friends. If you’re going to try some wacky new techniques and you’re not sure how they’ll turn out, the ability to go waaay back in your history can be handy, but setting up too many Undo levels can really cause your computer performance to take a hit. Use Snapshots periodically instead; that’s the little camera-looking icon in your History palette. (You can also do some fun things with Snapshots and the Art History brush, but that’s for another time.) With a Snapshot, you can experiment to your hearts content without fear, particularly when you’re going to be doing a lot of drawing or changing a layer Blending Mode (each of which takes up an action in your Action palette, and which can add up really quickly.)
4. The Dissolve mode explained. If you’ve ever wondered exactly how the Dissolve blending mode works, here’s the skinny. First, the effect is only noticeable in areas where the opacity is less than 100%. Whatever level the opacity is, Dissolve mode turns a number of pixels equal to that percentage to an opacity of 100% and all the other pixels to an opacity of 0%. So, if you set the opacity to 75%, Photoshop will pick three-fourths of the pixels at random and make them full opacity; the other 25% are reduced to zero opacity, becoming invisible. If the master opacity is 50%, half the pixels become fully opaque, and half become completely transparent. This works for anything where you can set the blending mode, not just levels; if you set a brush blending mode to Dissolve and reduce the opacity, it’ll spit out a random percentage of visible and invisible pixels the same way. Soft-edged brushes will be fully opaque in their centers, but will pixelate at their edges where the opacity reduces and the Dissolve mode can kick in. (And if you don’t like the pixellated look, you can always just add a touch of Gaussian Blur later to soften them up.)
5. Save complex selections. I use the same 10 second rule for selections as I do for tool presets; if something took me more than 10 seconds to do, I look for a way to keep from having to do it again. Select > Save Selection is one of the ways I do that. This saves your selection as an Alpha Channel so you can call them up at any time. There’s a lot you can do with Alpha Channels once you really grok them, but even the rawest Photoshop recruit can save themselves a lot of time and trouble by saving those oddball selections.

Tomorrow, I’ll post a brief tutorial on creating realistic paper textures right out of Photoshop; no scanning required! (And while I’m at it, I’ll get a chance to mention Actions, another time-saving tool I’ve come to love.)

On a lark I decided to install Foxit Reader 2.0, a PDF reader. If you’d told me before I tried it just how much faster it is, I don’t think I would have believed you. It’s quick with small PDF’s, but the speed difference with big, graphics-intensive PDF’s is nothing short of amazing.

I tested it out side-by-side, putting it up against Adobe Reader 7.0.9, with the very big (31 MB) very graphics intensive SLA Industries PDF, and the results were simply astonishing. Foxit was able to scroll through the document as fast as I could turn my mouse wheel where Adobe Reader was clipping along like Doom 3 on a Pentium II.

If you’ve got a PDF with fillable forms, Foxit kicks Adobe’s butt as well. With Adobe, if you fill in the forms on a document and want to save a copy, you have to print it. Foxit allows you to save it as a PDF, with the forms filled. (I tested this out on my own Fudge On The Fly NPC Sheet, and it worked beautifully.) This makes it incredibly useful for gaming, particularly with documents like character sheets.

The only thing I’ve found so far that Foxit doesn’t have going for it is an in-browser plugin. But really, most of the time I just end up downloading a PDF so I can read it offline later anyway, so that’s no big deal.

I’m going to try it out for a while longer, but short of some cataclysmic failure, I’ll likely be sticking with it. Don’t get me wrong, I’m an Adobe fanboy; Photoshop, Illustrator, and InDesign are my Software Holy Trinity, and as far as making PDF’s, they’re the best. I’ve been increasingly less satisfied with their readers over the last couple of iterations, and Foxit has just gone to prove what it was I’ve been missing all this time.

And it’s free!

I’ve been considering what to do for my next project after I finally complete Reign of Ice. I’ll likely do a couple of short, easy projects I’ve been kicking around, just to get them out of my system. But I’d like to have another big one that I can have cooking on the back burner while I’m at it.

With that in mind, I’ve had an idea of doing a Photoshop cartography how-to book.  “Fantasy Cartography with Adobe Photoshop” is the working title; I haven’t decided if I’ll try to tackle any modern or sci-fi stuff in it, or just save those for a second volume. It’ll really depend on how the first one turns out, if I decide it’d be worth the trouble of doing.

I don’t think I’m the world’s greatest cartographer, but I do know that I’m fit to bursting with tips, tricks, and shortcuts enough to fill up a book.