Thanks for all your insights! Seems as if I'd have to step up my GM game a little bit then. I only make maps to spice up the battles I'm planning for and only very occasionally I make a map for illustration purposes. I once made a map of a town but we didn't do much with it. That's probably my fault, as I don't really get how to use illustrative works as a prop in game. It's just a lot of work for me with the result that everyone says: "oh, nice!" and then putting it into their handout folder and never looking at it again...

I totally have respect for your effort! Going to such length to get a realistic picture of how medieval towns might have looked like! That's awesome! I'm sure You'll make a great map!

May I ask how you've gotten this commission? Especially as you mentioned that something of this size was out of your comfort zone? Have you been asked and you thought: well, that'll be a challenge, let's try! Or did you apply for it? If so: how did you get to the decission to do so, if you where thinking that that might get over your head? I've no idea how this commissioning thing works and am really curious how that came along for you...

I see, thanks for your insights!

Very good work! Need to bookmark these to find your tips later so I don't make the same mistakes ^^

I was just about to say the same!

Color key is such a powerful tool! And I don't think it's lazy at all ^^

I think Monsen is on to something. I increased the line width to something non 0 and it get's better. It's still not wysiwyg so I'll play around a bit more with line width and the effect strength.

Thanks for the hint!

The Gimp version worked like a charm! I tried this one first as I had already prepared the guide lines, since I figured I'd need those anyways for manually cutting the picture.

One remark on for future readers: If you use Image->Slice along guides you get all the images in separate tabs, which is good if you want to work on them further, but tedious for saving. However I found out there's a second way of doing it: Filters->Web->Slice opens a menu with a few simple options, most notably image format and a path to save them to. With this method you don't get the tabs, but the pictures are saved at the specified location.

I have other tilesets to prepare as well, so I will use the other methods for those.

Yes, that what I was talking about, Sue:

i turned of the blur effects on the left one, so you can better see why that is not working for me:

the left one is I was going for originally, the right one is what I get if i do two wall shadows, one as wall, one as drop.

the two wall shadows have a strange interaction that the dropshadow does not have. But even if that was not the case (or if I ditch the wall shadow as you so kindly pointed out): I still cant get a proper treetop shadow. For that to work automatically I have to put multiple dropshadows next to each other and set a rather high blur, so they smear into each other and the underlying hack disappears.

I had one other "genious" idea: what if I just draw a big magenta circle over the treetrunk put that on a shadow sheet, make it a wall shadow as drop and then apply color key. Most of you will probaly instantly see that this does not work either. I did not see it, I had to experience it. The effect one gets is something like this:

or nothing at all if the color key is applied first.

I don't grasp a lot of effects yet, especially those that use some kind of a filter like the edge stripes and the displace effect, so maybe those are capable of adding an automatic treestop shadow that follows the sun, but the only way I see at the moment is to live with the fact that we can't change the sun afterwards and just hardcode a bunch of dropshadows.

Or just eyeball it and place the shadows manually on their own shadow sheet.

If we had a scale option in the wall shadow dialog, we could use your treetrunk symbols. I think those come in two parts. so we could make the roots on one layer (with a wall shadow if we wanted to have evening/morning feeling) then put the second part on a second layer, again with wallshadow but this time as drop shadow and scaled up. that way the two shadow effects wouldn't have this strange interaction, the second part would get blown up before the glow effect get's a hold of it and that way we could get sun following treeshadows semi automatically...