Transcript:
Hello, hello, and welcome to this guide on how to use two minute. Tabletop map assets to create a custom battle map in Photoshop. Welcome, everyone to my computer screen. We’re going to jump right in and create a custom canvas file new now, of course, we are working in Photoshop today, but most image editors will have all of the options and tools we’re going to use. So if you’re using or a clip studio paint or anything like that, just find the different fields. We’re going to use in your own program and you should be good to go, so we’re going to set this to inches. You want to work with inches since that’s a very relatable Number metric? I’m gonna just do 23 by 16 since that’s my personal standard and for resolution. This is the big, important number, so let us swap over to our map pack. Today we’re using the dungeon room builder map pack or asset pack, technically, within this pack, We have a 140 DPI version and a 300 DPI version. DPI means dots per inch, so this means in each one of our inches. Were gonna have 300 by 300 pixels pinyon’s. It also goes by a PPI. It just depends if you’re working with like photos or digital graphics, but it really just means the same thing. So 300 pixels per inch is what is preferable for custom maps since it’s bigger and bigger is better. Unless your computer can’t handle it. The standard for Roll20 is about 140 DPI. So you might choose that one. We’re going to use the 300 DPI. And within here, we have a whole bunch of assets for creating a dungeon, a custom dungeon room. So yes, we have with our height and our resolution set. Everything else is pretty inconsequential, so hit create. You will have this now. This grid overlays toggle of all in Photoshop. You can find it under view show grid and there’s a hotkey -. So pro tip number one is always work with layer groups. Here’s the button in Photoshop. I’m going to click that we get a brand new group, and if we double click that we can name it, something like floor and in that floor group. I’m going to drop a floor now. The reason we stressed, the point at DPI is so important is because it allows you to just drag and drop in here and it will be at the correct resolution so we can see here. This is the back up. I have on some of my older stuff. These dimensions appended to the filename. If this imports at the wrong size, just fall back to these dimensions, and you’ll get something at the intended resolution. So when you drop it in here, it’s in transform mode, which means you can scale it now, but recommend it since like. I said it’s all correct resolution. Just drag it around and you should have snap to grid turned on. That’s here in view. Snap to grid! Make sure you have a little check there. Once that’s checked, you can move it around and I’ll snap to the grid. We’re just gonna fill this floor layer up to begin with when you have your move tool selected and this will be your main tool used today. You want to have Auto? Select first of all, we’ll get to the hotkey in a second. You want to have Auto? Select turned on so that whatever you click once we have a billion assets on here. Whenever you click will be the one you begin to move and we’re going to without bothering with right, Click copy duplicate. Whatever we’re just going to hold down Ctrl and Alt, and then drag whatever we have clicked, and then we’ll create a copy, and we want to make sure we put all these copies inside a layer group because like. I said we’re going to have two thousand-plu’s assets later on, and we want to have some semblance of order, so that’s a floor, so start our next layer group. What shall we call it? Waltz wall sounds good and within there. I’m just doing this offset cough. You could probably tell, so we’re just gonna kind of make up a dungeon as we go, in fact. I’m gonna mix the visibility of the floor so that we can see these better not gonna do too much of this because this is just a tutorial, not like a let’s build. Yeah, next little hot key tip when you’re rotating these hold down shift and they’ll snap to 15 degree increments, which means, yeah, so instead of getting an almost straight wall, you can rotate it to be exactly straight, and these ones are designed just to, and then pop quiz. What was our first hotkey? Hold ctrl alt and drag and you’re copying. So that really is the main takeaway of this little lesson. Oh, yeah, and if you want to if you want to do play this one, you just click it first to select it here because we have. Auto Select working, and then we can control drag and then to bring up that transform mode where we can rotate it. That’s just ctrl. T like, so, we’re just going to make a nice rounded kind of edge. I see there’s a gap here, so you should bunch that down, which will create a gap. P is quite that down too. And then we can click that control drag CTRL T hold shift to rotate in increments and drop it down. Yeah, and you can see with these tools and with dragging and dropping new assets in shift and rotate to rotate in increments. Drag and drop, itll. Snap to the grid! Put a little -. Yeah, yeah, we can very quickly. Add assets this way. We can see here this. This one would serve better to be on top, so just any any one of these assets we can just click it because we have. Auto Select enabled and it will highlight it here and then we can change the order to bring it on top and it makes a bit more sense. These are all in the wrong layer group, so we’re gonna put that in there. You can see we can kind of keep this under control. If we have a good number of layer groups, so maybe a floor group of all group and one or more kind of general clutter or whatever groups up to you, you know what maybe? I’ll just duplicate. Here’s another trick for groups. You just replicate entire groups. If you select the group, you can transform the whole thing at once. Maybe that’s obvious to most people, but yes, so in doing so, we’re just going to cheat and very quickly. Create a complete room here and then. I’ll go over one final tip For this tutorial. We’re going to enable our wall at floor That is, and we’re going to talk about layer masks in Photoshop. You can add a layer mask all the way. I know how to edit is to click this button. The rectangle with the hole in the middle that’ll create a layer mask. Now this layer mask you can think of it as like, a visibility mask or like a fog of war apps. So if we use the eraser as an example, let’s make a nice big eraser, and we select our layer mask, and then we begin to erase. We can see here our background showing through because it’s masking a layer group and everything within this floor layer group is being masked by this shape we’re creating in this masking system. Black is 100 percent transparency. White is 100% visible, golly. That was terrible explanation, but I hope it makes sense. Perhaps you can just watch and see so the beauty of it is unlike just erasing an asset, you can just bring it back by painting back over with white, and if you want to get technical, you can use a grey as a partial transparency and in doing so, you can get some cool effects like this kind of looks like a puddle, doesn’t it? So there’s one way you can use a mask anyway? I’m going to reset my mask because the main function of the mask right now is to mask this floor so that it’s only within our room. Since all of this is technically like subterranean fog of war, So I’m gonna select the mask and I’m going to press Ctrl I to invert it, Which means it goes from 100% visibility to 0% and then we use the lasso tool and I’m going to select the interior and then I’m going to press that invert hotkey again control. I and what do you know that? We have our floor back, but it’s just here, and if we were to go on and say at a room over here, we can quite easily do the same thing here in this case. I’ll use the fill tool and I’ll fill it in with white because on mask white is 100% visible and there we have it, we can go on to add pillars and like not, so you can see the possibilities with 1s effect, or we have quite a few, so go wild and please show me what you create as a final little thing. If your asset pack doesn’t have the DPI. Macchia, it means it’s one of my older packs when I was just creating roll 20 packs and also those old packs kind of they need updating so first of all. Please find that asset pack name, put it in the comments, so I know to go back and update it so that I can give you 300 and the 140 DPI assets and make it so easy to use, but if the DPI isn’t marked, it’s likely that you’re going to import one of these, and it’s gonna be like way larger than what you intended in this case. You just want to keep transform mode and read this little one by one guy it that I have put on there and size it manually to that size and then what a useful thing to do is just set an area off the side of your canvas to put all of these things so that you don’t have to keep importing and importing and importing and resizing over and over again. You can just go over here to like your cassette palette and you can duplicate it and you can do that any number of times. I’ve duplicated the wrong one. That’s much easier than importing and resizing every single time you might even import like all of them at once and select them all and transform them all to down to size all in kind of one step. I’ve done a very fast and dirty, but and then you can put them all off to the side there’s. Some weirdness going on here. Just you know that, and then from there, you can kind of start the same thing, so that’s the roundabout way of doing the ones without the DPI said for now, but please do leave a comment and I’ll go back and edit those and make them even easy to use. Yeah, let’s jump back to the camera. I guess for for an outro. OK, everyone! I hope that has been informative. I hope it’ll help a few people who are perhaps using image editors for the first time and let me know in the comments. What other tutorials you’d like to see and I might do guides like this for all of the popular free image editors. Otherwise we’ll move on to some more advanced stuff. But, uh, yeah, thanks and let me know what you’d like to see. [MUSIC].