oh hoy hoy!

[Derahan]

Hay!

So yeah, im a new guy around here gotta say its an awsome place. I have been a fantasy fantast for about some years now, around five if i recall right, im 16 so i began reading fantasy when i was around 11 and now ive gotten into writing ma own story and since i wanted to designe one heck of a world, although i didnt know how, i searched for an hour aroudn web before i found this and this was a life saver for me


Anyhway im us using the software GIMP as its the only free one ive found so far and been able to download.

cheers! from new dude!

[Steel General]

Welcome Aboard!

There are several tutorials available here for the GIMP to help get you started.

[jtougas]

Welcome to the Guild. As SG said there are plenty of GIMP tutorials here as well as plenty of GIMP users willing to answer questions.

[Derahan]

yeah i could really need to ask someone a few questions

[Wannabehero]

Welcome aboard Derahan.

There are a few other other free artsy softwares out on the webs besides GIMP (though GIMP is a great choice).

Paint.net (PDN) is a layer-based raster program, much like GIMP and Photoshop, but is much simpler, though with the proper plug-ins it can be near-comparable to GIMP. The advantage of PDN is it is extremely user-friendly. The disadvantage is it has less high-end capability (like tablet pressure sensitivity response, or built-in layer masking).

Inkscape is another free graphics editor, though it is vector rather than raster. Sometimes vector is just what you need though, so it can be a good thing to have.

You can also get trial versions of some other great programs, such as Fractal Mapper 8 or Genetica (Genetica is a texture editor/generator, but you can draw in it too). Both of these sadly have exporting/saving disabled in the trial versions, but a little ctrl-printscreen action is nearly as good.

Goodluck in your map-making endeavors!

[Derahan]

Is there any tutorial on how to make realistic maps with gimp?

[Ryan K]

Welcome to the Guild, Derahan

[Jaxilon]

There are a ton of tutorials for Gimp - Just go into the Tutorials forum and run a search for 'gimp' and see what pops up. The ones with a large number of pages following them are the ones that have been used the most. As far as realistic goes, I guess it depends what you are after. It seems to me that any software will only take you so far. Some of them farther than others but bottom line you might have to be able to draw what you want. If you can draw it then there isn't much limit on what you can do.