World Map attempt

[sindustries]

So I'm making a go at my second map using gimp. Trying a world map this time. I'm going to make this a WIP thread so I can ask questions when I get super confused. And I am now at a part which is really confusing me.

I'm trying to make some fancy coastline effects, similar to what Butch Curry does in his fantasy cartography series #14.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OGIwB0rywZ0
At 7:40 into the video, he breaks his coastlines up a bit by locking the transparency and then adding some noise.

I simply cannot get this same effect with GIMP. First of all, is the lock transparency the same thing as "lock alpha channel"? I can't find any lock transparency in the gimp interface and every search I do seems to suggest it is this box to the right of Lock on the layers menu in gimp. But when I click that box, I cannot add noise to my coastlines I've created. I can erase them with the eraser tool, but I can't seem to apply any noise filters to try and break them up.

[sindustries]

Well I figured out a way to do it. The only noise effect that seems to do anything with Lock Alpha layer on is Hurl. I applied that noise, and then just desaturated the color out of it. That broke up the coastline outlines. Though I'm still confused why the other noise effects don't seem to be doing anything. Then I went through RoBA simple mountains in gimp tutorial quickly and made a mountain range that I'm pretty happy with. So later today I'll probably make some more mountain ranges on the map.

Love all the tutorials here! So many to go through and learn from!

I also just noticed that my selection strokes of the coastline also stroked the border of my image! heh. I'll have to erase that.

I'm not sure that the old paper background is really appropriate for this map, but I'm just going to keep going and see what it ends up like.

[Larb]

Yeah, get that when stroking coastlines, depending on how you do it, you stroke the very edge too so have to delete it. One option is to inverse your selection and stroke the outside of that instead.

Anyway, it looks good! Although I'd consider making the parchment texture slightly less bold.

[Midgardsormr]

Welcome! I don't recall ever seeing someone adapt the Zombie Nirvana tuts to Gimp, so you definitely deserve some rep for that! Maybe when you're done you can post some tips for the Gimp users about how the process differs.

[sindustries]

woo! rep!

Wisemoon converted the first 3 of the Butch Curry tutorials to GIMP, and I certainly used those in trying to follow along with the first town map I did. After that I had a lot of head-bashing trying to get through the rest of the ZN tuts, which is why I'm doing this one as a WIP thread, mostly so I can just stop and ask some questions before giving myself brain damage. I kind of started following the ZN tutorial #14 or 15 where he begins doing a world map, but when it came time to start making features on the land, I really liked some of the mountain tutorials on these forums, so started using those.

[sindustries]

Well, been spending a lot of time working on mountains. I used RobA's simple mountain tutorials, though after I kinda got the hang of it, I kept being super picky on my mountains and fine tuning and redoing areas. I'm getting tired of doing mountains now, so I'm just going to leave it be, but I think I may have settled upon something I like. I'll get back to mountaining up my world sometime later this weekend.

I also took away the paper background. Didn't really like it for this map.

[Ryan3932]

Really? I like the map a lot better with the paper background, but that's just my opinion