Awesome stuff man. Reminds me of the CC2 hand drawn symbols, and I _LOVE_ those.
Thanks for sharing!!!
I tried messing around with dual brush and that doesn't work. The second/dual brush acts as a mask that is applied to the top/main brush...much like adding texture to a brush. Say you have a 50-pixel mountain shape and your dual brush is like a 25-pixel mountain...only the pixels that correspond to both will be printed so you end up having to use a round brush large enough so that it doesn't clip off an bits. Then if you have large spacing the 2 brushes don't space properly as they are different size.
All in all dual-brushing doesn't work...I've beat myself about the head for many weeks trying to get it to work but it won't. The best you can get is setting the size randomness (which has a whole new set of pains to be endured -- if said tip is 50 pixels at one spot the spacing to the next tip is 100 pixels but when the next tip prints it's at 30 pixels and 200% is then 60 pixels so if the next tip is say 100 then the images produced tend to overlap). You can offset this a bit by setting the spacing to 300% or more but then it doesn't cluster properly.
So what I end up doing is a series of single clicks and if something overlaps I undo it. But it's still the same shape, which sucks, so it's best to learn GIMP or Paint Shop Pro for this kind of stuff. Or have tremendous patience.
If the radiance of a thousand suns was to burst at once into the sky, that would be like the splendor of the Mighty One...I am become Death, the Shatterer of worlds.
-J. Robert Oppenheimer (father of the atom bomb) alluding to The Bhagavad Gita (Chapter 11, Verse 32)
My Maps ~ My Brushes ~ My Tutorials ~ My Challenge Maps
Awesome stuff man. Reminds me of the CC2 hand drawn symbols, and I _LOVE_ those.
Thanks for sharing!!!
"Time is a great teacher, but unfortunately it kills all its pupils."
- Louis-Hector Berlioz
All my work is released under the Creative Commons 3 license. Feel free to use and copy, but please give credit where it's due
Yeah, I've tried all those things before too and didn't get any further than you did... it's frustrating.
This brush pack I did go thru and resize the brushes to manageable sizes and they all have different size/spacing/angle/roundness and other jitters to aid in a more fluent look, but in my maps I ultimately ended up using these textures that I could fill in here and there for forests.
Mountains aren't so bad because once you know where your range is going you can just fill them in as needed.
I'm glad you like them shpena. My goal in making many of these brushes was to make photoshop as easy to use as some of those tools in CC2. I tried out CC2 for a bit and was able to do some simple maps, but missed the complete control and flexibility that I had with Photoshop. Once in photoshop, I missed the fractal terrains and dodaad stamps that they had so I began making my own brushes that I could use as my own "rubber stamps." I know CC2 is intended to be an easy mapmaking tool, but it was so radically different than photoshop, which I have been using for upwarsds of ten years now, that I found it difficult to adapt and change. I haven't tried CC3 yet, but it looks to be much more impressive than CC2. I have a feeling I'll be sticking with what I know tho.
I intend on doing a set of castles, outposts, towns, and other landmarks at some point as well. I'll continue to post the ones that I can.
Last edited by Wag; 03-02-2009 at 10:15 AM.
what about water brushes in this style? do you have one?
Brilliant! Thank you!
The mountain brushes are very useful indeed. Being a GIMP user, I tried RobA's randomized hose, but found it unpractical because the mountains are of different sizes and shapes. So I made my own GIMP hoses, separating low and high mountains to their own groups and adjusting the sizes to roughly match. I've included them in the attached zip file, in case anyone is interested.
Brilliant!
Any restriction on use/license? I want to finish up this request and this would save me the time of making my own set.
-Rob A>
My tutorials: Using GIMP to Create an Artistic Regional Map ~ All My Tutorials
My GIMP Scripts: Rotating Brush ~ Gradient from Image ~ Mosaic Tile Helper ~ Random Density Map ~ Subterranean Map Prettier ~ Tapered Stroke Path ~ Random Rotate Floating Layer ~ Batch Image to Pattern ~ Better Seamless Tiles ~ Tile Shuffle ~ Scale Pattern ~ Grid of Guides ~ Fractalize path ~ Label Points
My Maps: Finished Maps ~ Challenge Entries ~ My Portfolio: www.cartocopia.com
They're just Wag's brushes placed in GIMP hoses and scaled a bit. If anyone has the right to restrict their use, it should be Wag, not me. It's not like you couldn't get the exact same results by using the original brushes as you would with these hoses - you'd just have to do more work by manually selecting and scaling each individual brush.
Thanks for the brushes I am going to try and make my first map!
bring it on! and don't be afraid to post your progress as you go, we love seeing that sort of thing
My finished maps
"...sometimes the most efficient way to make something look drawn by hand is to simply draw it by hand..."