I took your advice, ravells, and played around a bit. I first tried duplicating the grass layers procedure to see what kind of effect I'd achieve. In the end it was a wash. While I managed to create a really nice mottled dirt color map I couldn't find a way to blend the dirt and grass layers to give me a mottled effect. I stepped through all the layer blending options, overlay, dodge, burn, difference, multiply, etc. So, I went back to RobA's original dirt layers procedure and played around with the settings. I tried applying a color gradient to the dirt color layer. Well, all I accomplished there was making the overall layer quite dark and not blending well at all. In the end, I found myself playing with the color levels for the dirt layer mask and was able to produce something more akin to what I wanted. While the difference is subtle it is noticeable. The result is shown below. The key here is to save your work and then save a copy. Play around with the settings on the copy and go from there.
I was looking at the base texture of the map and noticed that the grass layer has a texture that runs pretty much North-East to South-West. When I lay my mountains in how distracting and, ultimately, incorrect will it be to have the mountains running against that grain? I suppose I could work out some sort of stagger of the ridges in a direction that generally supports the underlying texture...
I don't think it'll be too distracting. I would agree with the alternate mountains though, those alternate mountains of his look great with the rest of the tut.
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Ok, so I continued on with a slight detour. I jumped from RobA's original Artistic Regional RPG Map tutorial to his Simple Mountains in Gimp tutorial. I've been playing with it for around the last four hours. I have to admit, I was feeling rather depressed with the results. The first image below is a screen shot of what I saw in Gimp. It didn't look much like Rob's tutorial. Ok, well, I learned some things. Let's export the file to a jpg and upload it to get some feed back of where I went off the reservation. Imagine my surprise when I saw the second image below. That's a screen shot of the same area as the first image just exported as a jpg. So, why am I not seeing the same image in Gimp as I'm working on it? That difference could have me futzing about with the map for hours and not making any obvious headway.
Clearly, I have more work to do, I need to smooth out the gradient better for one and a couple of peaks there blew out. I'm also not happy with the color. Any suggestions of how to modify the color map for the mountains so they look a bit more realistic, i.e. brown more to the peaks and green more to the slopes? Right now it's just picking up the color map under the area I selected. Any other suggestions would be gratefully received.
geez, why can everyone do mountains better than I...lol As far as color check out Ascension's tutorials atlas style and/or making a continent in photoshop. He uses a nice looking gradient that may look good with this map. IMO, mountains should have a little white at the top followed my some brown in the middle followed by green at the bottom. I do like the stroke you used for the outline of the land as it looks sort of like waves coming in. I would def add some character to the ocean layer with at least a render cloud or difference cloud. Check out Saderan – a tutorial for a nice ocean look. Overall though, it seems like a great start.
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I'd suggest getting out a brush tip, turning down the opacity way low, then hand-paint the color in (on a new layer so that if you don't like it you can delete it). I say this because I haven't done RobA's tut and I don't use Gimp. Paint some dark green around the base of the mountains, not on the mountains but on the plains, as this green will be the start of the forests. Then around the edge of the mountains paint in some brown, then splash a lil white for the peaks. Doing things by hand will give you more control but it takes longer.
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I have no idea what the deal with the color difference is, but it almost looks like you have some kind of mask or the wrong color gray for your overlay. I have also encountered less than satisfactory results (ie why can't I get it to look like RobA's) and tried both these methods. You may want to fill with more 50% grey or mask and then blur the mask to get out the noticeable edge to the mountains. I think you are going about it the right way.
Ok, I went back and re-did the whole mountains sequence. It did go faster this time since I'm familiar with the steps. I did find a spot where I goofed up before which would have had a slight effect on the process. In step 3 I neglected to turn off the selection so that caused some funky results previously. This time when I selected my areas for mountains I focused more on the 'splotches' of dirt color and used the feathered option of about 10px to grab a touch of green around the base of the mountains. The thought was that this would help lay in the color map a little better. Now, this process does neglect the whole concept of using the alternate style mountains tutorial as a means to place mountains wherever you want since I'm constraining myself to a randomly generated dirt layer. ::shrugs:: I'm taking this as a creative journey rather than I-have-a-specific-destination-in-mind.
So, the results are below. I'm still at a loss to explain the difference between what is visible in Gimp (image one) while working and what shows up when exported to a jpg (image two) but in any event the results look better than I had managed previously.
I'll probably leave things the way they are now and move onto the next step which I believe is forests. I'm not yet sure if I'll stick with Rob's tutorial on forests or if I'll try arsheeshA's variation.
I'm not sure what settings you are using but when you create a .jpg it defaults to like 85 % quality of the image unless you changed that. I haven't had a lot of problems with what I see in Gimp verses what comes out of the .jpg save. That said, I haven't mastered a single tutorial. I've tried a few but I guess I am just one of those people who doesn't mind pounding out my own path. I would like to go back and walk through one of those tutorials again just to see what I can understand now that I have used Gimp for a while. I think I could follow the steps this time.
Maybe RobA our resident Gimp Master will come by and shed some light on what is going on with your .jpg - it's looking pretty good though I have to say.
Last edited by Jaxilon; 08-08-2010 at 02:21 AM. Reason: English for crying out loud
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I still can't say what is going on, but the mountains do look good. Interesting idea to use the dirt layer to guide you for mountain placement. Sort of like Ascension's tutorial in that respect.
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