WIP using RobA's GIMP Tutorial

[DanChops]

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 understand exactly what you're saying. I'm doing the same thing, only I'm using a somewhat more recognizable coastline as my base.

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....

That's huge! Mine is only 1100 x 800, and my (admittedly ancient) PC is struggling to keep up. Good luck!

[Talroth]

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.

[RobA]

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>

[Karro]

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>

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.

[Redrobes]

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.

[Karro]

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... antivirus... I didn't even think of that. Thanks!

I'll bet if I shut that down, at least while working on maps, that ought to help at least some.

[Redrobes]

Maybe - try it by all means but its better to just know. Press ctrl alt del and get the task manager button and use that and look it up. Better yet is to use the sys internals version :-

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/s.../bb896653.aspx

which has a little more info. Actually the whole sys internals suite is excellent but its a power users set of tools. The process viewer is pretty easy tho. It should just tell you who is burning all of your resources.

If it is an anti virus issue it will be with the file touched scan. Every time a file is read or written it scans it. Very slow - might not be worth it.

[Karro]

A few additional WIP images.

Following RobA's technique as near as I can follow, I add the continent, improve the grass, and add dirt:


First layer of grass



Improved grass with textures



Dirt


Next up: I tackle mountains!

Thoughts?

One thing I notice: now that the land is down over the ocean, I see that the whispy white-blue coastal waters all moved to the right side. Is there any way to get it equally whispy on both sides?

[Karro]

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!

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.