[GIMP][Beginner] Making Cabinets Look Taller Than Tables?

[Sharpe]

Greetings!

I'm running GIMP 2.8.14, though I could be persuaded to try out Paint.NET.

I'm a beginner.

How I make my maps is I draw the wall outlines on a grid in black and white, then texture with CGTexture.com textures (mainly), then use different filters like drop shadow and such. After that, I add objects from the Dundjinni forums. Last, I try to get in there and detail however I'm able. That's it in a nutshell.

Well, I "built" some cabinets and bookshelves and cupboards and such just using the square/circle select and the drop shadow filter, basically, but they seem all seem to be the same "height."



I want the left-most cabinet and the bookshelf, which is just to the left of the head of the bed, to appear much taller than the wizard's study, the bed, and the trunk/chest.

I thought about extending the shadow of the taller objects, but it didn't quite look right to me. I might mess with that a little more, but I thought I'd ask here for advice before wearing myself out.


However, I'm very inexperienced. Sometimes on this forum, I get answers that are so truncated that they are of little use to me. "Just do a reverse backflipamajigger on it," means nothing to me. "Click on this up at the top of GIMP, then click on this filter, then set the one field to this. See how that looks," would be a big service. Sorry, I'm pretty ignorant.


Thanks a lot for all the help and advice! :-)

[Sharpe]

Here's what I've tried:



I think that's probably pretty good. I think the new shadows make the cabinet and bookshelf look taller than the desk and bed and table.

Maybe I'm bias, though.

To make the shadows, I duplicated the layers of the tall objects, then used a motion blur filter on the layer set to length 35 and angle 255, then selected the blur and filled it with black, then gaussian blurred that (at 7), then put it under the original layer and set the opacity to 50%.

EDIT: I also deleted the wall drop shadow and that helped quite a bit too.

However, if there's any advice, I'd still be happy to hear it. :-)

[Sharpe]

Hmmm . . . I also think maybe tall things shouldn't have stuff on top, or much stuff. I mean, if it's too tall to reach up there easily, and it's too tall to see atop for the average player character, it probably should be sparse of decoration. It's a psychological thing, I think. It has as much stuff on it as a table, so it looks like a table.

The room needs a whole lot of attention, but making the tall cabinets and shelves look tall was really my main concern.

Again, any help is appreciated. :-)

[Midgardsormr]

I think you've pretty well figured out the relative heights problem, although now it makes the walls look short. Not sure how to solve that one.

The thing that jumps out at me in this image is that each object has a distinctively different blur quality to it. You'll want to try to make all of those objects have a similar softness so that they all appear to be in the same space and approximately the same distance away. Since it's hard to make blurry objects sharp, that will unfortunately usually mean blurring your sharpest objects to match the blurriest ones.

You can minimize the amount of degradation you'll have to do by carefully choosing your textures from high-res sources and limiting the number of times you resize, rotate and move them. Every time you perform a transformation on a raster image, it gets a little more blurry, and if you do it enough times you'll destroy the texture. I'm not sure what tools Gimp has to manage that problem, but if worse comes to worst, you can do your layout with low-resolution "proxy" layers, then switch in the high-quality textures near the end of the process.

[arsheesh]

I agree with Midgardsormr that you are on the right path to solving the relative height problem. However, another reason the larger drop shadows you've applied to the cabinets etc. doesn't look quite right (aside from what M. has already mentioned) has to do with the light source being somewhat vague to begin with. See you've placed drop shadows on the interior of all of your walls, as if the light source originated from the top of the wall itself, such that the light is diffused throughout the room. That makes cast shadows on objects in the room look somewhat odd, since all shadows would be directed toward the center of the room. I'd recommend thinking about where the light source emanates from within the room itself and have your cast shadows reference this source (here is a great example of what I mean).

Another issue is that you have cast shadows for the larger object while the bed and desk have none.

Finally, if you want the shadows to really look lifelike then you may want to include more detail than merely a drop shadow effect. For example, in the image I linked to the artist has included subtle detail to the shadows (e.g. latter rungs and bed posts).

Hope that helps,

Cheers,
-Arsheesh

[Bogie]

A lot of good advice, but still a pretty nice map as is.

[Sharpe]

Thanks, everyone! I really appreciate the general critique and advice very much! Thanks!

However, I'm still most interested in making some pieces of furniture look taller than the others when both are basically plain rectangles with wood textures.

I love David Hemenway! He's my favorite fantasy dungeon cartographer! I've commissioned him once before and he was a joy to work with. Very professional and awesome results—stunning artwork.

However, that's not a room I can use as an example of using shadow to make some objects look taller than others the way everything is situated in my room right now, and I don't think moving the tall objects away from the wall is at all rational. I'd love the light source to be in the center of the room with shadows going outward! However, with the cabinet and the bookshelf against the walls, it would remove their shadows altogether.

Again, I'm using the longer shadows (that don't look quite right, as I said and everyone is agreeing) in furtherance of my attempt to make those two objects appear taller. I noticed in the image above that I'm missing some shadows. That happened when I went to save it to upload here. Left some layers invisible. Oops!

But, yeah, I need to make a little shadow on the top of the tall objects so they don't look taller than the walls.

And, I need to make the shadows uniform. Big time. Some are drop shadows. Others are motion-blur-turned black and blurred.

I'm forced to use 70 dpi scale for Roll20.net, unfortunately. That makes working with objects and textures from the Internet harder because everything becomes so pixelated/blurry when making it so tiny and also because the source may not have been the best, either.

It also a 4200-pixel-square map, so it's pretty big. With just one room furnished, GIMP says it's a 6.4 GB image while being edited and nearly 800MB when saved to its native format. It's about 6 MB as a flat jpg at 90% (but can compress to 3.7 MB at 80%). My computer is currently fried and I'm waiting to build a new one until the deals that come around Black Friday and Christmas since it's so close. Hopefully, I'll be able to edit large, complex images much faster with a powerful computer (probably an Intel Core i7-6700K or i5-6600K with 16GB of DDR4 and a GTX 960 or 970 video card).

Thanks again!

[Jaxilon]

Hey, these look pretty good but just to give you some additional ideas it won't hurt to look at how some others have done it.

This guy uses a slightly distorted view and to me pulls it off quite nicely. Combined with the lighting effect I think it could be something you want to look at: Henning and here is a link to what I'm talking about.

I think it mainly comes down to sharpness, lighting and shadows and by that I mean if I was trying for it, I would make the highest items crystal clear and the lower items gradually softer and then combine light and shadows to further the illusion.

Also, I think these are looking great!