After spending a weekend playing Minecraft, I wanted to try making a map out of cubes. I thought it would be cool to try creating it with an isometric-perspective in Photoshop. I started by making a grid of triangles (I used the interwebz for a good reference) then filled in the rhombi (diamonds) with colors for the terrain. Blue for water, green for grass, you get it. I put each of these on a different layer.
Then I went in and shifted the layers so that each color was one level above the last. It's starting to get cube-y.
From there I painted in the sides and chose more colors to flesh everything out in 3D. It probably looks worse here than the previous image but I wanted to head in a more "organic" direction. Kinda hard to do with cubes but oh well...
I went right into detail from there. The colors changed a lot and I moved some features around, but I'm happy with where it's going. I like how the forced perspective makes decisions on shading a lot easier. I didn't have to think too much about the colors once I did a few floors and walls. I started to get pretty free-form with many of my decisions until I thought about how this map might actually work if it was being used in an RPG. I added in the bridge and ramps in anticipation of interesting game moments. I'd love to use this area for an outdoor-ambush scene or something like that. Adding the grid back in really makes it feel like it's part of a game to me.
I know this image is a big leap from before but I ended up drawing almost everything on one layer, so I didn't really have much in-between work to show. I'll save more work-in-progress images next time. This isn't finished yet, so stay tuned for the final update!
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