Step 4 : Detailing the layers

– Stone Layer – part 3

Since the sand was giving me so much trouble, I decided to go & take a look at some of the other metarooms that have sand floors. Rooms like C2toDS & the Ettin Desert.

The sand in the Ettin Desert was the one I preferred a bit more, so that’s the one I’m going to use as a reference for getting the sand in this metaroom to look better.

Some people might just clone the sand from this room & use it in their own metaroom, but personally I prefer to make my own.

Now, lets take a closer look at our reference image shall we. What features of that sand do I like, that made me choose it over the sand in one of the other metarooms? Let’s find them, so we can keep them in mind while working on our sand layer.

– That sand has a lovely grainy texture – hmm, might be hard to match that lovely grainy texture, but we sure will try.

– The mix of colors in the sand – hmm, that’s easy enough to copy, we will just take a screenshot of the metaroom, paste it into a new file in the same program we are using to work on this metaroom, & use the color selector or eyedrop tool to get one of those colors to use as a base for our new sand layer.

– The shading, the sand gets darker as it goes deeper. That shading makes it look like just a tiny bit of light manages to bounce it’s way through the sand crystals before fading completely. Ahhh… this is a feature that will be easy to mimic. This just might be the feature that finally makes that sand layer look right, lets focus on it & see what happens.

Going back to our workfile, let’s get rid of that previous failed attempt & sand & try again with an empty transparent layer & a new sand color selected from the screenshot of the Ettin Desert. This time, we make the sand layer bigger, have it go a bit deeper into the stone as well as go a bit higher above the ledge to provide a flat surface for creatures to walk on.

Well, I’m a lot more pleased with the shape of the sand this time than last time, so let’s work with this & see how it turns out. Let’s get that sand selected & start with the shading.

Usually I prefer to start with the darker shading & work my way to the lighter shading since occasionally I’ve had the darker shading mess up the light shading & turn sections of it an unpleasant usually grayish yellow-greenish color.

Hmmmm… looking more sand like already isn’t it? I might have gone just a little bright with the light shading. It doesn’t look bad here, but in some of the following images it will show.

Now, on to trying to give it a sand like texture. As usual, now that we have the shading how we want it, lets get that layer duplicated again & play around with the textures. Now, I know I have a filter that will give a sandstone like texture, I used it earlier on the base stone layer, but… by this time, I think you know how much I like to play around with filters & textures. Applying that sandstone filter may be the quickest & easiest way to do the sand layer, but it’s not very fun for me, so…. Bring on the textures!

Ooo… that has a lovely ripple-like effect doesn’t it? Let’s keep that one for now, & duplicate the shaded base sand layer & find some more interesting textures & filters to play with.

Hmm, that also has a nice look to it, doesn’t it? Almost like the sand grains are finer & more tightly packed. Let’s play with this one for a bit & see how it looks with different layer effects.

Whoa… way too dark, it looks nice, but is way too dark. Let’s see what we can do about that.

Well, making the layer slightly transparent allowed the ripple layer to show through better, but I don’t really care for how it made the darker shaded areas look. Maybe it will look better when it is on top of the sandstone texture layer. Let’s get that base layer duplicated & textured so we can play with it.



Yup, very sandy looking isn’t it? Now it’s time to really play & see what we come up with.

Whoa! Definitely not the effect I was going for. Cool looking, & it certainly has an aquatic feel to it, like the sand is fading away into the distance of a murky pond, but not the effect we are going for right now. It is an effect we will keep in mind for a different area & layer though. Try again…

Too bright! Too Bright! I think you can see what I meant when earlier in this post I said that I might have made the shading to bright. The sand… it glows like it is about to explode, try again quickly!

Whoa, too dark again, pretty but too dark once again.

Ahhh…. That one looks just about right, not too dark, not too bright, & it blends in rather nicely with the rest of the stone. It doesn’t look that out of place. Let’s see how those other layers look when added on top of it.

Oh… well, that was interesting, the sand looks much more finely grained now doesn’t it? Let’s see what happens when we add the ripple layer to the mix & play with the layer effects & transparency….

Well, that was a disappointment. It just completely undid the previous effect. Let’s see what happens when we move that layer on top of the other two.

Oh…. That was a very subtle change, it might even not be noticeable on some computer screens, but the dark areas aren’t as dark, the light areas aren’t as saturated… I think I like it. I think this is the one I will keep. Time to deselect & check the edges.

Oh look, a bit of green around those bottom edges again. Time to break out the layer mask to hide it!

Ah, there we go. A blurry brush, a bit of transparency, & now it looks like it is part of the ledge & not just pasted on top of it.

Uh oh….. & now I just realized that I forgot to make the sand layer for the rest of the metaroom. Opps…. So now I have to go back & repeat those steps for the rest of the areas in the metaroom that need that sandy layer.

Oh well. 😛

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