My old workflow was very rigid and ineffective – I needed to go ingame and take more screenshots all the time, I exported each room as a PNG that then I put into one massive PSB (easily over 50,000 pixels wide/high sometimes), where I would work in that large PSB, connecting rooms and adding flavour, which significantly slowed me down even with 32GB RAM and a GTX 1060 6GB.
Additionally, every time I needed to go back and correct a mistake in a room, I needed to reexport the PNG and manually replace it in the PSB. This also meant that sometimes replacing a PNG meant that I needed to re-check all of my edits on top of it, to make sure they still line up.
- Take a lot of screenshots.
- Once all screenshots are done, dump them into a psd file for each room without much care for lining them up.
- Go over each room’s PSD, line up the screenshots then set up rough masks.
- Properly do masks, occasionally realising I need more screenshots, having to go ingame and take some new ones and then proceed until all rooms are done.
- Assemble the whole area based on the ingame map.
- Finalise each room.
- Connect rooms, correct room transitions (this was one of the longest parts).
- Fill out edges of the rooms (by adding shadows, rags, vines, etc) then add some extra flavour to it (floating crystal pieces, flying motes, fog/light effects etc).
- Connect to the world map.
2. I put all of these PSDs into one huge PSB and line up the rooms roughly based on the ingame map.
3. I then clean up each individual room of seams and then refine their position, making sure no rooms overlap.
4. After that, I create a new PSD for each room connection and work on connecting the rooms seamlessly in a separate PSD. The reason for this is that when I need to update any part of the map, I can do that in a small file instead of working with the big PSB that can be as large as 50,000+ pixels wide/high.
Working this way is significantly faster, and once the PSD is saved, it automatically gets updated in the master PSB.
5. After all the rooms and connections are finished, I then add any extra “flavour” to the map such as the flying motes in Greenpath, or the floating crystal pieces in Crystal Peak, any light or fog effects etc.