[Award Winner] Eriond - A Tutorial for GIMP & Wilbur

[JefBT]

It's fantastic, oterrien. Everything looks very nice, and the lakes and the plateaus are awesome.

[arsheesh]

I redid my map by adding more reliefs and lightening the sea. And then, I took the opportunity to add cities. Do you think it is better ?

Attachment 63537

I like the sea colors a lot. Very attractive! I might suggest more of an off-white rather than the tan color for the label background blur, at least where the labels overlap with the ocean, but otherwise I think this turned out beautifully.

Cheers,
-Arsheesh

[ludgarthewarwolf]

Okay, so I've hit a snag with the rivers. I have the mountains and everything pretty naturally blended into the difference cloud maps, and when I load it into Wilbur I get a pretty nice looking map. My issue is that when I try to make the rivers using arsheesh's method of incise flow erosion, the river's are either jagged lines, or spiderwebs. I've also tried to use waldronate's method of a waterways mask, but that wasn't working either. What do I do?
Pic of the map when loaded into wilbur:

Pic of map right before incise flow:

[Deadshade]

I am just a newbie and started with Learning digital mapping techniques only 2 weeks ago.
I noticed that I when I was using the Terraformer in FT3 and added clouds, then when I loaded the file in Wilbur, the clouds were interpreted like altitude maps giving interesting and realistic shapes.
Unfortunately I was unable to edit these shapes to give a map I wanted and then I happened on this tutorial doing exactly what I wanted to do.
First results are good and that's why I would also like to say a loud Thank you.
Really an impressively efficient workflow!

Btw a small comment. As I am not a very proficient GIMP user, I followed the tutorial literally step by step and noticed a confusing explanation in the first part.
It should be :
New layer>White (Clouds 2)
Set mode to difference
Filter>Render>Clouds>Difference Clouds
Set mode to difference (because the previous operation resets the mode to normal)
New from Visible (Difference1)
Then same for Clouds4

So (unless I severely misunderstood something) the Set mode to difference has to be done twice what was not clear from the tutorial

[Deadshade]

OK after a break I wanted to continue the tutorial but definitively crashed at page 7 with the gradient map.
I think that there was a problem that I couldn't identify with the creation of the bump map - probably at the stage when the temperate layer was created and filled with grey.
Here is how looks my temperate layer before I start to apply the first gradient - left side page 8 of the tutorial.



When I apply the gradient the whole map turns black with the exception of the small very white dots which correspond to the highest peaks on the planet. Zooming on them I see that they are collored by the whole Spectrum of the gradient eg from black to white through the greens and browns.
Also note the strange flat grey shapes which correspond exactly to the mountain mask (the grey is the grey that was used to fill the temperate layer at its creation). Yes, all the layers and channels are turned off when I apply the gradient - only temperate is on.

So I have 2 problems - one is that for some reason the mountains are masked on the temperate layer with the exception of the highest peaks but this is not lethal. This would only make an ugly map
What is lethal is that I can't get the layer covered by the whole gradient Spectrum even if I edited it many times. Whatever the setting, the whole map is basically only one color (black, green , Brown) , the totality of the Spectrum can be only seen on the microscopic white dots.

Can somebody help me with that ?

[ltan]

Deadshade: I have no clue what I am doing, but have you made a copy of the gradient? I found that was the only way that I could edit the gradient to change the color levels. The only other part I would check over is when using Wilbur and setting the Mathematical > Spans. Perhaps those two values need to be adjusted as well?


For the record, here is my attempt. I am not entirely pleased with it as I think the mountains are eyesores.

[Deadshade]

Deadshade: I have no clue what I am doing, but have you made a copy of the gradient? I found that was the only way that I could edit the gradient to change the color levels. The only other part I would check over is when using Wilbur and setting the Mathematical > Spans. Perhaps those two values need to be adjusted as well?

Yes I have noticed that only copied gradients were editable. Apparently GIMP doesn't allow to edit gradients that are supposed to be standard.
But this is not my problem, I didn't edit the gradients because the tutorial doesn't say so.
I just followed the instructions literally.
So I arrive at page 8 and my temperate layer is exactly the grey shaded map I joined above. Clearly there is already something that went wrong but this not (yet) a problem either - I still have a grey shaded map as I should even if it is ugly.


Next is a basic step : the tutorial says "Layers (Temperate) > Colors > Map > Gradient map"
This is just a matter on selecting tabs so nothing can go wrong. Theoretically I should get something like Figure 17 (p..
But I don't. What I get is that everything goes black with the exception of the white dots (tops of mountains) which go over the whole gradient (e.g from black to white).
So here is something that goes seriously wrong and I have no idea what.

It was only then that I created a copy of the gradient and pushed the black all way to left.
Then executed again the command above. This time the whole map went dark green with the exception of mountain tops.
So it is the same effect like above - for some reason when the gradient is applied on my grey shade map, it decides to color everything with just one color (or an extremely narrow band around one color).
Whenever I change the gradient I just change the color of the band but it still stays tiny so that the result is like everything has only one color.

Perhaps if somebody took my map and applied the gradient on it could tell me what is wrong ?

Anyway thanks for the answer.

[ltan]

Deadshade: Do you have a copy of your map prior to getting to the gradients? Your mountains look heavily saturated, which either happened prior to Wilbur, or something done in Wilbur flattened them perhaps?

Here is what my height map looks like going into Wilbur:

If it looks good going into Wilbur, and coming out, then possibly your Channel Masks are funky?

hth

Jason

Edit: Wait, I think I understand what you are trying to do and my comment on saturation may not be valid.

If what I am thinking that you are trying to do, this is what I was able to adjust the sliders to for your map:



And buried a bit in the text on page 8, just before the first tooltip, it states:

"You will likely have to "Undo" the gradient map, adjust the various segments of the color pointer bar, and then gradient map the layer again. I usually have to do this several times..."

Again, I am not sure if my suspicions on what you are attempting to do are right or not, nor am I sure that I have done the gradient any better than you have o.0"

Edit Last: I also had to change the mode to RGB for the image you attached above. Not sure if that changes anything or not.

[ltan]

ludgarthewarwolf: Mind attaching an image of what your resulting image is *after* incise flow? Also, what settings are you using?

[Deadshade]

If what I am thinking that you are trying to do, this is what I was able to adjust the sliders to for your map:


And buried a bit in the text on page 8, just before the first tooltip, it states:

"You will likely have to "Undo" the gradient map, adjust the various segments of the color pointer bar, and then gradient map the layer again. I usually have to do this several times..."

Again, I am not sure if my suspicions on what you are attempting to do are right or not, nor am I sure that I have done the gradient any better than you have o.0"

Edit Last: I also had to change the mode to RGB for the image you attached above. Not sure if that changes anything or not.

Thanks for your comment ltan.
Actually the map I linked is what I have getting out of Wilbur and the strange flat tops on the mountains is something that happened in Gimp during combining masks or something like that (I suspect the bump map process)
Yes I read the page 8 that's why I played with the sliders to try to get a bigger portion of the gradient than just the black part.
And yes I also get exactly the same thing you did (after moving gradient sliders) what shows that only an infinitesimally small band around green is used and I am far from something like figure 17.
So now what's sure is that not any gray shader map can be colored by the gradients correctly. But I have no idea of just how grey or white or whatever it must be to use the whole range of the gradient.

Surprisingly though, my Height map isn't so different from what is shown in Figure 13. Probably darker but globally similar.

Any idea why when the gradient is applied it uses just a small part of the spectrum instead of the whole range ?
I thought (probably naively) that the gradient command automatically sets the left gradient end to black (0) and the right end to white (1) and then gives to every pixel a number between 0 and 1 depending how much black and white it contains.
For instance a pixel 0.75 (clear grey 1/4 black and 3/4 white) would get the color which is at 3/4th of the gradient.
Apparently this is not what it does