Easy Dungeon Mapping

8/12/2019 Easy Dungeon Mapping

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Hello, and welcome to a tutorial for easydungeon mapping!

You ll need: Excell GIMP or Photoshop. This guide will use GIMP but Photoshop isreasonably similar.

Firstly, make an excel document. Make allthe squares 50 x 50. Select all the cells andgive them several conditional formattings.

Format the cells with the condition Text in the Cell Contains (might be is equal to in your version of excel). You can use keywords like room or up , or just use letters. R , U , etc.Make normal rooms a good neutral grey, anything that goes up a lighter grey and down a darkergrey. Feel free to add any other room types. (Eg, Blue for water zone, Purple for Teleports, etc)

After you re done, select all the cells and make them black. They ll change into the lighter colorsif they get filled in, otherwise they ll be a nice empty black.


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Start filling in rooms. I d start somewhere in the middle and grow outwards, or start with anexit/entrance and let it grow from there.

I ve included a few downs and a few ups. In the next picture, you ll see that I ve added ups tocorrespond with the downs. It helps to keep them on the same level for personal reference.


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Mess around. Big rooms, small rooms, etc. I m doing a more natural cave that would be dug outby water or maybe a Dragon, but you could also do something more smooth and carved. Once

you re happy with it, Screen Cap/Print Screen and jump over to GIMP.

Drop your image into GIMP and isolate a single floor.

Do this for all layers of the dungeon. Make sure they re all the same size, and line them up withthe layers above/below them by making on layer transparent and moving it around until the upsand downs match up to each other.

I was stupid and deleted all of the black so thatI could line things up more easily, don t dothis. You ll want that black here soon. If youdelete it on accident, it s pretty easy to fix.Make a new layer and fill it with black, thenmerge it with the layer above. Repeat adnauseum until you have layers that look likethe image at the top of this page.

HAVE YOU SAVED?

Save early.Save often.


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SAVE. (In my case, Drowned Maze.xcf. Save again, with adifferent file name. (Drowned Maze Layers.xcf) This phaseis a bit crucial, and you may wish to restart from here.

Use the Select by Color tool to select black, so that

you get all the areas that you aren

t using in yourdungeon. Invert your selection (CTRL+I, or Select Invert) and fill all that with white. I use a big paintbrush,although there are lots of other ways to do it. This way s simpler for me.Now you ll want to blur it. Go to Filters Blur Gaussian Blur. How much you blur will varybased on your resolution and how much you want to retain the blockiness of your caverns. At myresolution, a radius of 30 retains most of the blockiness, a radius of 60 makes things mostly round,and a radius of 75 loses the roundness entirely.

Lastly you ll go to Colors Threshold. You should see that it ll go from a blurryimage of what you had to a crisp black-or-white image. You can adjust where thethreshold between black or white is too, if you want thicker or less thick hallways.Below are the results of different blur levels and the resulting threshold.

Radius: 30 Radius: 60 Radius: 70

Blur

Threshold

See how the first (radius: 30 pixels) looks like a smoothed dwarven hold, thesecond (radius: 60 pixels) looks like a natural cave formation and the third(radius: 75 pixels) looks like abstract art? I generally like somewhere between30 and 60, although if you have larger rooms/hallways you may want to gobigger.

(Don t lose the original file with the ups and downs and things. You ll need itlater.)

HAVE YOU SAVED?


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If your dungeon has multiple layers, go through and do the same thing to all of them. If you re using a program that usesmacros, you might want one of those running.

You might get into a situation where specific rooms need to be smoother or blockier than other rooms. To achieve this, copythe layer right before you blur it and paste it. Blur and Threshold both layers. Start erasing the parts of the top layer so that itlooks like a smooth transition into the layer beneath it. (You might have to use the paintbrush to clean up edges. I didn thave to because I m a god.) Select all the black in the upper layer and clear it, then merge the two layers. Boom, now it has

both amounts of smoothing.

HAVE YOU SAVED?

Once all your layers are Thresholded to satisfaction, you ll want to resize (Image Scale Image) your image a bit. Make itat least 2000 pixels tall/wide. It ll make the next phase work better.

Apply an HSV Noise to your layer. (Filters Noise HSV Noise). Crank everything but Holdness all the way to theright.

Now, Gaussian Blur again. Somewhere in 15-20 range should do. Less if you want rougher, more jagged walls, more if you want smoother walls. Threshold that again too, but drag the slider so that you start seeing some of the dots on the wallsexpand and make the walls rougher. You ll probably see some dots in your hallways, don t worry you re supposed to.

Use the Magic Wand tool to select the black area. Invert the selection and fill that. Ta-da, no more black dots.

I actually want my walls to be nice and smooth, so I m not going tobother with this step, but I felt I ought to put it in for those who d wantit. It s a good way to make your walls feel nice and rough. You ll haveto mess around with how much you blur and where you draw thethreshold lines before you get it just right for your mapping purposes.

One last thing before we move to color, check your map for anything like the image at the right.That sort of formation wouldn t occur naturally

in a cave (although it might show up in aconstructed cave).

I m going to go in withthe painbrush to make that less of a glaringfault. Hit it with a Threshold afterwards sothat the blur of the brush doesn t make itstand out strangely in a crowd. Much better.

HAVE YOU SAVED?


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In this Phase we re gonna start doing color.

On the page above I posted a texture palateof stones textures that work well in a cavesystem. If you have some you already work

with that s also a valid option.

Use the circular selection tool (for the firstand last time) on the middleof one of the squares. UseSelect Feather. Put it ataround 85 or so, and pressCTRL+C. This will make anew brush with a fuzzy edge.

Select the white space of your cave and paint on the new brush. You can vary the brushsize to get a bit of variety, and it couldn t hurt to go in once you have a base coat usingone or two other textures.

Next we

re gonna start putting in the cave walls. Select the borders by selecting all theblack space and hitting Select Borders.Fill that all in with a good wall texture.

Make sure you fill them all in fully, there s not really any way to go back fromhere.

Select the Borders again. 2 pixels wide should do it. Feather that to 4 pixels.Paint all these borders in with a black brush set to Burn at Opacity 50% or so.That ll make a nice transition between floor and wall and nothingness.

Here

s the final version:

It looks reasonably professional. I m going to fill in the outside, ifonly to reinforce that this is the entry layer.

HAVE YOU SAVED?

Entrance to the Outside

Naturally you ll have to have some way to get intothe dungeon. Using a Soft Light brush, large sizedat full opacity, colored a very very light blue, youcan give the illusion of light pouring into thedungeon.


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All of the outside was made the same way that the

floors were made, with sand, grass and dirt texturesand then a water texture. Normally you might wantto put more effort into it, but the focus of this is theinterior and the dungeon, not the outside.

HAVE YOU SAVED?

Most dungeons have things in them. Altars to Horrific Gods, Nigh ImpregnableDoors, and Bookshelves full of arcane lore, that sort of thing.

To make a more solid wall, use the Free SelectTool, select an area stretching from one edge ofthe wall to the next. Fill this in with a light grey.

Use the Border Select tool to select 1 pixel alongthe edge, and feather it by 3 pixels. Darken this abit, and add a dark line in the middle. Fuss withthe place where the door meets the wall a bit sothat it blends better.The same technique can be used to makebookshelves.

Secondarily, there s torches. Torches are prettyeasy to make. Make a new layer, set it to HardLight. Make a little brown dot and a much largerFirey Orange dot. Copy/Paste this until you havethe whole dungeon covered. However, it s worthremembering that there s nothing scary about a

well-lit dungeon. Once they

re all in place, selectthe black. Grow the selection by 9, feather by 3.Invert and delete. Now the light is only playing outon the walls.

For Ups and Downs:

Fiil in some dark for the Down sections andsome Light for the upwards sections. It s notperfect but we ll get back to that.


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That s about it. You might want to take some time to add in some scenery, tables andchairs and all that lot. Plants might come into it. You can add water in the same way

you might do any other textures, same for Lava.

Lastly, to add labels, use the Text Tool. Once you have all your text the way you wantit, condense it all to one layer. This will change it from a text layer to a single layer.

Select all the text and Feather the selection. Make a new layer, at about 40% Opacity,and fill the selection with black (or some other color). Put this behind the Layer withthe labels and you re good to go.

It s best to keep these saved on a different layer, in case you want to make a change tothe layer underneath.

On the next few pages I ll include some Texture Palates. If you re looking for more textures like these, tryhttp://texturelib.com/
http://texturelib.com/http://texturelib.com/http://texturelib.com/


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Easy Dungeon Mapping