[Award Winner] Eriond - A Tutorial for GIMP & Wilbur

[ludgarthewarwolf]

ludgarthewarwolf: Mind attaching an image of what your resulting image is *after* incise flow? Also, what settings are you using?

oops, forgot to check back in. It was the settings, I messed around with it a bit and got it to where it looked nice, here's what it ended up looking like.

[arsheesh]

Hi everyone. Apologies for not chiming in to lend a hand. I've been away from the Guild for the last 6 or so months.

I am just a newbie and started with Learning digital mapping techniques only 2 weeks ago.
I noticed that I when I was using the Terraformer in FT3 and added clouds, then when I loaded the file in Wilbur, the clouds were interpreted like altitude maps giving interesting and realistic shapes.
Unfortunately I was unable to edit these shapes to give a map I wanted and then I happened on this tutorial doing exactly what I wanted to do.
First results are good and that's why I would also like to say a loud Thank you.
Really an impressively efficient workflow!

Btw a small comment. As I am not a very proficient GIMP user, I followed the tutorial literally step by step and noticed a confusing explanation in the first part.
It should be :
New layer>White (Clouds 2)
Set mode to difference
Filter>Render>Clouds>Difference Clouds
Set mode to difference (because the previous operation resets the mode to normal)
New from Visible (Difference1)
Then same for Clouds4

So (unless I severely misunderstood something) the Set mode to difference has to be done twice what was not clear from the tutorial

Yup, you're quite right about that Deadshade. Must have missed this. Thanks for bringing it to my attention. I've uploaded a corrected tutorial.

Thousand thanks ! This is great !
No I didn't use blur.
Actually I was going through the tutorial to mostly learn things. So even if I think that I can now use Wilbur reasonably well (in any case compared to Gimp) I didn't spend much time with working "realistically" the height map.
What I did was a succession of erosion, basin filling and incising to just get a general shape in order to try to get color on it what was the target. An annoying thing is that the eroding process erodes the mountain tops as well.

Now I see that you succeeded with a really heavy deformation of the gradient and what you get looks right to me. You just applied the gradient directly to the height map or you did some special Gimp magics first ?
The contrast was the first thing I thought about when I failed with the gradient but I couldn't find where the hell is this contrast among the billions of Gimp tabs.

Same can be said about the layer modes - I opened it once and saw that there was a hundred options so that to find out what they did by trial and error would take at least a month with 5 hours/week what I approximately dedicate to it so I gave up the modes for the time being.
What is up with this "lighten only" mode you mention ?

On a completely unrelated front. I have just created a nice fractal coast in another software but for resolution/size reasons can't export it directly in Wilbur. So I will need to cut it up in 4 or more probably 6 parts and then put them again together.
I think I read somewhere that Gimp can do that. Can you give me a general idea how to do it - import 6 pieces and merge them together ?

I'm afraid that without looking at your GIMP .xcf file directly I'm not sure why most of the mountains (save for the tips) got blacked out. As for the gradient map, I've noticed that even slight differences in the brightness and contrast of of a heightmap will require adjustments to the gradient map. I've had to edit the gradient map for nearly each now map I do in the Eriond style, and sometimes that has resulted in widely different gradient maps.

Deadshade: I will send instructions on stitching the images together in a PM so as not to hijack this thread from the main tutorial.

As far as getting the gradient to work, I made a copy of the height map, then using the copy I applied the bump map. The image I used for the bump map was the same layer that I was applying the bump map to. This may not be the correct method of ding things as I am having artifacts on the sides of my mountains that makes them look poo-ish. Once the bump map has been applied, the settings I used above in this case, I then made that resulting image the Temperate layer. Then applied the gradient there.

Itan, thanks for stepping in and offering to lend a hand in my absence.

oops, forgot to check back in. It was the settings, I messed around with it a bit and got it to where it looked nice, here's what it ended up looking like.

Ludgarthewarwolf, glad to see that you figured out the problem without my help. Nice job on this map BTW, it turned out great.

Cheers,
-Arsheesh