Looking good! I look forward to reading about your map as you work through the steps.
Looking good! I look forward to reading about your map as you work through the steps.
Thanks! I was hoping I wasn't breaking a rule by posting the whole image instead of just the thumbnail.
Thanks. So far, I'm really satisfied with the progress I'm making. I'm working on these two maps primarily as practice--neither is of anyplace in particular, and the shapes and designs are just a test to see how the random coast generation method RobA describes will interact with a more or less specific coastline shape.
I'm a little concerned how this is going to go once I try to apply it to the actual world map I've been trying to develop. I have a file I had started working on before discovering cartographer's guild, but at 7200x3600 pix, it's about 50X as large as these files, so I fear I may crash GIMP on my poor laptop entirely once I start using these techniques on it....
Last edited by Karro; 05-26-2008 at 10:02 AM. Reason: edited wording
I understand exactly what you're saying. I'm doing the same thing, only I'm using a somewhat more recognizable coastline as my base.
That's huge! Mine is only 1100 x 800, and my (admittedly ancient) PC is struggling to keep up. Good luck!
When editing on older hardware, one tip that can work well is to do all your layer work on smallish sections (512x512), then flatten a copy and paste it into a single layered larger image for your final product. I'm not sure how GIMP handles its layers internally, but try this trick and see how it works for you.
The other tip is to set your environment settings up correctly for your machine. I think the defaults are way too low.
I run on a AMD Turion64X2 with 2GB Ram. Here are my settings:
Tile Cache is the biggie, and set at 1/2 physical memory (but could go even higher depending on what else you do at the same time)
-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
Thanks for the pointers. My laptop isn't really all that old (it's a dual core pentium with, I think, 2 gig of RAM and a 512MB video card... but it's running Vista, so a lot of that gets sucked up by the OS; sadly the comp was a gift so I didn't have a choice in OSs), but it runs a little slow. I'll take a look at the environment settings today to try to make sure it's set up optimally.
I was thinking about cutting up the final product into chunks and see what I can do. It may not be easy, since the continents and island chains kind of make an interwoven mesh over much of the world map. I tried to make the continent placement look natural and organic.
Even with Vista that ought to be easily enough to hold a large image. 7K x 3K is 80Mb or thereabouts in memory and even if you had 10 layers and some undo that would be only be about a 1Gb. Theres probably something else at play here like anti virus or something else thats thrashing your system. You should look at your processes and see how much CPU and memory they are all burning.
Ah yes... It looks like the corner of Africa, the Arabian peninsula, and India. It's still recognizeable, but also still random. Hopefully, that was your goal?
But yes, the worldmap I started was quite large. I wanted to have a world map where I could change the overall zoom level (to focus on a region with a moderate amount of detail, instead of just a continent) with a minimum of fuss. I also wanted to maintain a few specific, long-standing geographic features that I had first drawn on maps of certain regions of this world when I was a kid (for no reason other than nostalgia). I guess there aren't many great reasons to keep it this way, but I hope I can still use this large map just the same.