How to make Cliffs or sharp elevations changes in Gimp or Photoshop?

[BaldAccountant]

I want to make a castle that is elevated from the terrain around it. What is the best way to make cliffs or embankments? I am not very artistic and I am using Gimp.

[waldronate]

The first question, of course, is: what kind of map are you making (and for what purpose)? What scale? How will you use it?

A common way is to leverage shading for a theoretical light source. Brighter highlights and darker shadows indicate stronger correlation with the light source. The notion of ambient occlusion (basically shadows close to the base of things caused by blocking out part of the light from the skydome) can be included by showing lower elevations closer to the edge as darker. Having explicit directed shadows in addition to ambient shadows and basic shading can also help. This technique assumes that you're generating a map where shadows of any sort are appropriate, of course.

Another option is to use contour lines (simple lines or layers that look like the layers in sedimentary stone) that are closer together. The closer together the contour lines are, the steeper the surface (a vertical cliff face has all of the contour lines collapsing together). You can combine contours lines with shading if appropriate to your map to reinforce the ideas.

Hachures are a technique once popular, but they have generally fallen out of favor for most mapping.

[rdanhenry]

Well, what does your map look like otherwise? If the style supports them, using contour lines is probably the simplest way to clearly show steepness of terrain. That doesn't work well with, say, vtt battlemap style, though.

Edit: Got ninjaed by Waldenrate (who gave a more complete answer). But the "it depends" remains. It's usually best to show what you have or at least a reference picture of the general style you are attempting to provide a framework for such questions. It's very hard to give a general answer to "how do I show X?"; it is much easier to answer "how do I show X on this map?".

[BaldAccountant]

This is what I am trying - a layer of rock texture under the castle layer and a layer of water under that. I am not advanced enough for shading yet.

[BaldAccountant]

Here is the updated version

[Kier]

Ok, so I use GIMP as well, I use a combination of drop shadows or create my own on lower and upper levels.

Instead of using the drop shadow, I sometimes take a wide brush, with a lot fade in it. The layer beneath the rock, trace the outline. I even go so far as using the jitter effect, which makes the path bounce in and out a little. Then adjust the transparency of the layer as needed. It creates a little more random line for me which I like it natural settings.

If you want to show a more gradual drop into the water. You can then even do another swipe on another layer above the rock and have it darker at the water and lighter at the top.

[waldronate]

That's a good start.

The simplest way to do shading is to draw black polygon over the areas facing away from the light and white polygons over the areas facing the light. Then set the opacity of both of these polygons to something like 25%. Repeat as required to get the shaded areas. You don't need to get everything, just parts that would obviously be lit. If you layer transparent polygons over each other, they get more opaque (and make the effect of shading stronger).

I took your map and added transparent black over the water and areas that would be facing away from a light coming from the upper left (it's a little sloppy over the water to look like shadows). I added transparent white over areas what would be facing that same light:


It may not be quite what you were looking for, but it's quick to do and doesn't require any more skill than you needed to draw the shapes, I think.

[BaldAccountant]

Thanks, literally learning something new every day. Only been using Gimp for a short while

[waldronate]

Learning is good! It's when you stop learning that things get hard...