[Award Winner] Using GIMP to Create an Artistic Regional RPG Map

[Airith]

"Mountains, EVERYTHING almost. sorry, just a lot of spots during mountains that were odd. Bump map area in particular.

Is there a better way to do forests?

-Rivers-, mine turned out strange several times. had to erase a lot of upper layers to get it to look right."

These are just things I wrote down while I was going through the tutorial, hopefully you can understand them

[nwelte]

Hmm I gave this tutorial another try and combined it with another tutorial I think you made. What do you think? Better than the first attempt I posted earlier? Still not happy with the mountains. And I have "dead space" on the image I need to fill. Think a compass would fill the space. Any suggestions for a a good compass?

http://i276.photobucket.com/albums/k...lte/Zurgas.png

[RobA]

Looks nice nwelte.

A little neon for my tasted (esp. the forest region) but I think it is the right scaled map for the technique. I'm also sure there is a a reason the roads are so straight (Other than curved paths in GIMP are awkward to work with )

Here is a compass I used in my quarry map:


Feel free to use it (the full image is a transparent background png).

-Rob A>

[nwelte]

I had trouble with the color of the map once I imposed it under the fuzzy layer in your paper tutorial. Found that the map was to dark and needed to be lightened. Unfortunately that created the neon look. Any suggestions on how to correct that?

[RobA]

Did you put it on the paper as a flattened layer, or is the whole thing a single many layered image?

I tend to make my maps as one image, them export/flatten them to a single layer which I then add the paper/background/weathering, etc. That lets you adjust the levels and saturation a bit easier.

-Rob A>

[nwelte]

I created the map itself as one multi layer image. I then create the paper as a seperate multi-layer image. I then copied all visible from the map and pasted it in to the paper image at the right layer.

I also think when I did the color normalization step that somehow that lightened the trees.

You have any suggests as to how to make artistic farm fields in this same style. As you can see from my map I tried to put furrows around a few settlements.

[nijineko]

i'm reinstalling gimp just to try this and the old paper tutorial out. =D thank you very much!

[ggdancer]

this is such a cool tutorial. I've been using Gimp for ages and this is one of the best tuts I've seen. It has inspired me to restart a project i started about 10 years ago. maybe i'll finish it now

[RobA]

Thanks ggdancer!

Hope you share your results.

-Rob A>

[Skycast]

This thread has inspired me to download GIMP and give it a try to make a map in this style. However I didn't get very far before hitting a bump in the road. Using the PDF as a reference, here's where I'm at:

Part 1, Page 8 - Created the "Land Noise" layer with clouds and changed the blend mode to overlay (I think I did that part right, but I'm not sure).

Part 1, Page 8,9 - Created the "Land Clip" layer and filled it with white using the bucket tool. Opened up COLORS > LEVELS and started changing the white output slider and nothing happened.

Obviously I've missed something here and being utterly new to GIMP it's not surprising. One question, when adding a new layer, what should the layer fill type be: foreground color, background color, white, or transparency? The only layer creation step that stipulated that part was the initial "Land" layer and it said transparency so I've created all my layers since there with that same type.

Thanks in advance...I'm eager to keep moving along with this experiement.