- Create your own Dungeon Tiles from scratch with Photoshop
We all love to use Dungeon Tiles in our D&D games. It adds to the realism of combat, provides for more strategic play and helps everyone see what is going on. With the release of D&D4E the use of Dungeon Tiles became an integrated part of the game to the point where it is hard to play without them. This has created problems for GM’s who like to create their own campaigns and who need maps. While you can easily print off a tiled A4 or A3 sheet and draw in your maps, it would be even better to be able to create your own dungeon tiles from scratch to match your creations exactly.
In the first part on creating your own dungeon tiles, we show you how to create basic rooms of any size.
Instructions
- Open a new document in Photoshop. Set the dimensions to be 2 inches by 2 inches with a 200-300 dpi.
- Put in grid lines to break up the image into four equal squares (these will be our four tiles).
- Create four layers (1 for each tile).
- Set your forward color to a light grey, and your back color to a darker grey.
- Select the first square using the select tool and go to Filters -> Render -> Clouds.
- Repeat step 5 for each tile making sure that you fill in the clouds on a different layer for each tile.
- Click on your first tile on the layer palette and then click on effects. Choose Emboss -> Pillow Emboss -> Soften 10 then click OK.
- Right click on the Effects sub-layer and choose copy. Select the three other layers, right-click and choose paste effects
- Select all (ctrl/cmd + A)
- Edit -> Set Pattern (name it something relevant like Floors)
- New document – set to how many squares you want the room to be (we used 5 x 5 above).
- Edit -> Fill -> Pattern -> Our Floors pattern
- Create a new layer. Filters -> Render -> Clouds. Set layer effect to Multiply. Adjust Opacity to suit.
- Draw appropriate Walls using the selection tool.
- You’re done!
Over the next couple of weeks I’ll show you how to use different textures to create floors of wood, sand, gravel, etc and to also add blood splatter, mould, slime, etc to your tiles as well. I may even show you how to add lava, magical effects, chairs, tables and other paraphernalia.
Similar Posts:
- Using the Dungeon Tile Mapper from WotC
- Creating old parchment and paper style handouts using Photoshop
- Creating your own Dungeon Tiles
- Dungeon Tiles and a sense of scale
- Using Hexographer to create overland hex maps
Interesting, keep the paraphernalia rolling! Photoshop is so huge, it’s good to pick up useful time-saving tips now and then (e.g. using rulers for selection — seems so trivial, but I’d never done it before).
After jumping through a few hoops, I worked out how to do this in the GIMP.
There are 2 types of clouds, the “Solid Noise” one works best (tick the randomize button or make sure you generate a new seed each time), and then to get the colours right you need to go to Colors->Map->Gradient Map.
Then, instead of Pillow Emboss (which, even with a script for it, seems not to work), try using Bevel: produces a decent result.
Finally, as far as I can tell, the only way of getting GIMP to use a pattern is by saving the pattern to the patterns directory. For GIMP 2, this is \GIMP-2.0\share\gimp\2.0\patterns, and it’s the same for other versions, just with a different version number.
This looks like it will be immensely useful to me. I just ran across this article via Google, but I will likely become a regular reader. I am curious; did the articles mentioned above regarding other types of tile ever get made? What I really need are wilderness, town, and city tiles, and I’m not that proficient with Photoshop (though the above wasn’t too hard to follow, despite the fact that I have a PC).
Hi! I’m glad you found the tutorial useful
it so happens that another one is going up this weekend focusing on creating furnture for your tiles. I’ll see if I can put up something on the other topics you mentioned in the next little while.
Fantastic. Thanks so much Rupert. Look forward to more of your articles.
Found this on youtube via a google search for making custom dungeon tiles. I have already been making lots. I wish I’d seen your tutorial before I spent a month or two learning! But I did learn how to do some fun stuff in Photoshop.
I am hoping you still intend to get some tutorials up on varying your tiles a bit as mentioned in the original. Is that a lost cause now, or should I hold out hope?
Give me a couple of days – a week at most and I’ll have the next one up.
For real this time…
The update is on its way. This episode is going to focus on creating the fittings for your maps.