Thread: ...make realistic coastlines and topography in Gimp?

Well......To answer your question requires the answer to another question. Scale. How far is it North/South and East/West.

If it is only 1 mile x 2 miles. Looks good. Is it something like the Cost of Africa/South America geography wise (mostly coastal plains/lowlands) or more like British Columbia (Coastal mountains = Lots of Inlets)?

North to south it is roughly 450 miles...east to west (to the furthest tip) it's about 840 miles

Original image size is 2000x3000 so had to shrink the copy down so it was small enough to upload!

Little bit of both NeonKnight, but I would be leaning more towards British Columbia...

I would say you need to get some more detail in your coast...

http://www.cartographersguild.com/sh...rnative-method
http://www.cartographersguild.com/sh...Island&p=96746
http://www.cartographersguild.com/showthread.php?9056

Then pick where you want your mountains. You can think about tectonic plates and where they might be crashing to form them. Once mountains are in then work out where hills and lower lands are formed.

Then when you have a good idea about the height over your land do the rivers.

http://www.cartographersguild.com/sh...he-right-place

Once rivers are in then work out lakes and paths that people would take to get around the land. Then at ports, junctions or convenient or strategic locations put down your towns.

OK...coastline is looking better and I had a play around with the land and the ocean...wanting to put mountains in next but not quite sure where to start? I roughly know where I would like to place them, but that's about it!!!

Still learning how to use the Gimp...I got pretty good at using photoshop back in college but that was a few years back, and Gimp is a bit different!

There are a number of great GIMP tutorials in the Tutorial section of the site. I would recommend going through a couple of those so you learn some of the techniques for GIMP. I know there is a coastal tutorial and I'm pretty sure I remember a mountains one. At least you have some PS background. When I joined here I didn't have any digital background. Gimp was my first such application and I've only done a couple of the tutorials but have learned tons.

Thanks, there are heaps of great tutorials, think I'll just have to keep going through them and trying different techniques till I find what works best

I'm a GIMP newbie too and found these tutorials really helpful, although it might not be quite the style you're going for?

RobA's "Using GIMP to Create an Artistic Regional RPG Map" and "Simple Mountains in GIMP"
Arsheesh's "Making Photo-realistic Trees in GIMP: A Mini-Tut"