Thread: *ahem* Yo.

Hi Heather, and welcome.
From what I've picked up (today, actually) Paint.NET was developed as a university project by a couple of students who wanted to improve MS Paint. I think they later worked for MS.
I'm trying to find out more about it, practical-wise, maybe you can help my query here:
Help for Paint.NET etc, please
Thanks.

Wow, long time no see everyone. I got into maps, fell out of maps, and now my interest has come back around again. I might post some things in the near future, or, you know, I might not.
Cheers!

Heh. I was like that at first as well. When I first started experimenting 6 months would go by before I did another experiment. Did that for a few years then when I found this place I began to do stuff every day.

Welcome back

Welcome back, Peaceheather! Good to see you again!

Yes indeed WB PH

We have had a few new guys/girls who are also using PdN, but I can't recall who they are atm.

Anyhoot, glad to see you back. Still using PdN?

You betcher sweet bippy I am, Korash! It's been upgraded and updated, and a great many uber-nifty plugins added. Mama like. Of course, my idea of fun still involves playing with all the GIMP tutorials around here to see how well they translate to PDN. The answer continues to be "quite well, thank you".

Had a happy accident a few days ago with an experiment I tried, and I ended up with something that could be riverbeds awaiting water, or political boundaries for various regions. Here, take a look:


Cheers!

Yup, Stroke some of those boundries and presto.....Rivers! or like you said, political borders.

So.......in the spirit of learning, what was the experiment on?

I was looking for a new way to randomize land placement. Right now I follow the tutorials here where you basically render some clouds and let the threshold settings determine where your land goes. But I've been playing this logic-square game (simiar to sudoku) and I got the idea to assign a color to each number, draw a grid and then Do Things to get the shapes you see there. The above actually started as a 5x5 grid - hand-drawn (yay for rectangles), so it wasn't perfect or anything, but *shrug*. Drew a grid, new layer, painted in the colors, then in Paint.Net, Effects > Distort > Crystallize. Muck around with the settings fairly large to get the basic shapes, then Cyrstallize again on a much smaller setting to get more detail. Rinse, repeat (although I think I only ran it twice in the above image) - each time you use a smaller setting, it reshapes the edges of each color blob and adds more niftiness.

From there, back to the rendering of clouds, engrave/emboss to get bumpy textured goodness, one last set of clouds with Things Done To It on a low opacity to add a little hazy atmosphere, and done. The only other thing was a not-so-great attempt to add some light-shine to the water, hence the big round dots with no consistent angle to them.

... Oh, lord. I'm going to have to write up a tut for this, aren't I.

Cheers,
Heather