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

[RobA]

Post 12: Let There be Mountains – continued

Similar to the dirt, apply a Gaussian blur and noise spread to the layer mask blend the mountains in a bit better. (Note, the Dirt layer was turned of in this image by accident)


Create a new layer called “Mountains Bump” and fill it with 50% grey, and set its mode to overlay. Now run a bump map filter, using the “mountain bump map” layer you had made a duplicate of a while back. Play with the elevation and depth to get something that look good.


To make the mountains pop a bit more, you may want to duplicate the “mountains bump layer.


This is another useful technique. Make bumpmaps on a 50% grey layer and they can be overlayed on colour below. That lets you go back and edit the colour layer without affecting the bumpmap. Since GIMP doesn't support layer effects this is one of the ways I have come up with to to keep the image editing flexible.

[RobA]

Post 13:Finishing the land up.

Forests are done the exact same way. EDIT - A Good Tutorial to making nice forests in this style in Gimp is here (Thanks arsheeshA). I used the same bump map as for the grass but increased the depth effect. I also put all the forest stuff below the mountain layers, so the mountains would appear to come out through the forest. You could do it the other way, and the forests would appear to run on the mountains. (as long as you make the forest colour layer slightly transparent. Here I duplicated the forest layer colour layer and set the mode to Grain Merge to emphasize the colours a bit.


This is where you can start playing with colours to get them balances, adjusting the hue and saturation, etc….Here I also added a new bump map hinting at under-water features. I also added a layer of low detail , small scale cloud noise over the whole map in overlay mode, and toned down the dirt bumpiness.


The last thing is to stroke the shoreline to give it a less jaggy edge. Go to the Chanels tab and right click on the Land Mask channel, and go Channel to Selection. Set the foreground colour to the High Dirt colour (or a colour that complements the piece), and stroke the selection (Edit->Stroke Selection) with a 3 px fuzzy paintbrush:


Rivers can be added by drawing with a fine fuzzy black brush on the “Grass” layer mask.
It helps to apply a small blur and then sharpen to clean up the lines:


For additional effect, this mask can be turned into a bump map and applied to give the rivers a bit of a bevel:


End of Part 2.

[Michael J. Parry]

Hi I get to this point and all I see is the mountians.. I am not sure why I can't see the rest of the map.

I don't suppose you would know what I am missing?