Nameless Abbey

[grayrt]

Continuing my quest for a good workflow, I decided to try my hand at starting my linework in a program I'm very familiar with: AutoCAD. I find that it's easier for me to get good, quick and accurate lines with AutoCAD, so I figured I'd try that out. I specifically wanted to make something with a lot of curves (which I find especially frustrating to do in photoshop) and with some repetitive elements that I could easily copy/paste with accuracy.

Setting this up actually took a bit of experimentation. Actually drafting up the building was relatively quick work, maybe 20-30 minutes. It took longer setting up the layout properties in AutoCAD paperspace and making sure my plot settings were correct. My first couple of tries had the scale work out correctly, but I was off of my photoshop grid due to some origin issues in ACAD. Now I've got it set up where when I plot a pdf it aligns correctly with a 100 pixel grid in my .psd file, which allows me to have the grid in photoshop and manipulate as desired.

After bringing the pdf into photoshop, I copy it to a new working layer, select all, then stroke the lines. This time I used a 2px hard round brush using a dark blue color value, and set the layer to color burn at 83% opacity.

Coming up next is all the artsy stuff to make this look better.

[Ilanthar]

Excellent start. Clean and legible. Looking forward to see the "artsy stuff" .

[grayrt]

Added some textures to the walls and floor, and made a carpet texture. Added some light shadowing.

One lesson I've learned here is to separate my wall linework from my object linework in autocad, and potentially bring those over as separate pdfs. Trying to create paths in photoshop from my complicated autocad line drawing proved to be so complicated as to be almost unusable.

[Lumtheo]

Awesome! Looks nice and clean and that carpet texture is great. Will you be leaving your linework in the final version?
It looks like your grid does go into your walls a bit in some places by the way. I can't wait to see it finished.

[grayrt]

Thanks! I think I am going to leave the linework in on this one. It seems like a style choice that I'm ok with making for now, but if you have any notes on it (e.g., too dark/thick, etc) I'm open to feedback.

Yeah, the grid is a little off. I've cleaned it up in the latest version somewhat. To be honest I was pretty sloppy with the grid and painting in the textures, so you'll probably find more that's off the longer you look at it. This was only supposed to be an education/demonstration piece using an Autocad -> Photoshop workflow, not a production piece, so I went through it faster than I should have. One lesson I'm taking away from this process is to export my Autocad drawing into several files I can bring over as separate layers into Photoshop, which should make the creation of work paths much cleaner and easier. It's a little more work on the front end, but I think it will pay off as a more polished looking end result.