Thread: Why can't I get the pattern fill to work properly?

It's the random sorta-circle that causes the problem. Tiling works in rectangles, and if you don't give it one, it will make it's own. You just need to select a rectangular area for copying, instead of the whole blob.

EDIT: You'll also probably want to make it into a seamless texture. There's a Filter for it, but I'm not sure how well it works.

I don't use GIMP but if you need help making the pattern seamless I'd be glad to do it in photoshop for you ... but you'll have to get it to work in GIMP yourself

oh, and welcome to the guild

Yes, make a square or rectangular sample. Then run RobA's better seamless tile script on it (it really is better than the stock one in GIMP). The problem you are having is that your new area is bigger than your source so it is tiling your shape and showing gaps between the circles. Also note that you can put your new pattern in your GIMP user file as a jpg, png, or pat file and it will work. DOn't forget to name it in the place where it says Created with GIMP as that is the text that shows up in the pattern dialog box, not the file name.

Wow, you guys know how to make a newbie feel welcome! Thanks!

Well, I seem to be stuck on some part. Here is a map I was making. The continents are hand-drawn. I scanned and copied the forest area pattern off a map from the Dragonlance Taladas box set, since I wanted my map to look like that (same style I mean). That part seems fine. But the mountains...eh. Not right at all. Here it is:



Not only is it looking oddly tiled, I also can't seem to figure out how to draw realistic mountain ranges. I'm good at indoor maps, but outdoor maps make me crazy. Any suggestions? I'm almost at the point of being willing to pay someone to do the mapping because the learning curve is eating so much of my very limited free time (notice how I'm posting at 2:32 AM? LOL!).

Your forest texture fill is looking pretty good. You might want to use a different texture for mountains. Why don't you take a look at the many tutorials for Gimp in the tutorial section? There should be a link in my sig on making textured filled mountains and forests. Genetica viewer (free download) has some good mountain textures you can use, but these are sattelite style and not handdrawn.

For your mountain ranges you may want to make brushes. You can trace or copy the outlines of the mountains that you are using as your source and then save them as a .gbr in your brushes folder. Or you can save them with multiple layers as a brush pipe (,gih). You will want to start with a transparent background and then consider whether you want to leave the mountains completely transparent or opaque. Look at Giidde's hand drawn map tutorial (it also just has a lot of good tips for using GIMP) which will also point you to Ironmetals hand drawn map elements tutorial. Let me know if you get stuck. And yes, map making takes up a lot of time.

Thanks guys!

Here's my problem. I definitely don't want realistic looking mountains. I've never liked maps that were part hand drawn, part real photo-like. And I want to keep the same style of drawings (ie the same type of mountains, colors, etc) that appear on the Taladas map because I plan on integrating my world with that one and I want the maps to look like they're from the same source, if that makes any sense. In other words, I want to duplicate that style of map.

The learning curve is difficult because I have very precious little free time as it is, and if it's all eaten up doing tech stuff, then I get nothing done. That's why I was thinking about paying someone to do a map for me based on my line drawings. I thought I saw a few posts here about people doing that. Or do you guys think maybe the learning curve is not as steep as it seems to me right now?

Send me some images of the mountains you want and I'll try to make you a brush pipe.

Thanks hohum! Sorry it took so long to reply. We've been without power off and on most of the last 5 days. Ugh! Should I email it to you or post it in this thread?