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

[arsheesh]

Sorry for the delayed response, I've been on holiday for the past several days. Thanks for the kind words and I hope you are satisfied with the end result. Let me know if you have any other questions.

Cheers,
-Arsheesh

[arsheesh]

Thanks Naeddyr!

Cheers,
-Arsheesh

[okami]

This is an amazing tutorial. I love it. I'm about halfway through and just have a quick question. Why do you need two different layers for placing mountains? (Mountains 1 and Mountains 2) It's just a bit confusing for me, is all. Also, I may just be missing something, but is there something specific I need to do in order to keep the pieces of mountains I've cut out inside my land area?

[arsheesh]

Thanks so much Okami! In response to the first part of your question, the reason why you need two layers for the mountains is that at a later stage you will be erasing (fading) the hard edges of the mountain pieces so that they blend in together to make a seamless whole. If you had placed all of the mountain pieces on the same layer, then you could not do this; any attempt to erase (at low opacity) some portion of the mountains would erase all of it. As to the second part of your question, well, you could always add a land mask to the mountain layers, that ought to do it.

Cheers,
-Arsheesh

[okami]

Awesome! Thanks for answering so quickly.

[David3]

thanks, arsheesh
great tutorial

[arsheesh]

thanks, arsheesh
great tutorial

My pleasure, glad it is of use to you!

Cheers,
-Arsheesh

[zukeprime]

Really awesome tutorial Arsheesh...though I have to admit I was pulling my hair out with Wilbur, mostly trying to get rivers where I want them. Just wanted to show what I was able to do. First, I started with a CC3 map I made for some folks on G+ just for kicks. I wanted to replicate this map, but give it a more realistic feel.

Obviously, you can tell its a CC3 map a mile away.

Using your tutorial, this was what I was able to do:


I'm really impressed with the results. Obviously, I'm still not done. For example, I'm going to have to manually add some rivers in the dark "blob-ish" swamp area in the south. The trouble I was having with Wilbur is that it wasn't making good rivers...it kept making these terribly short "wisps". My solution was to go back to Gimp and tone down the Land Clouds layer (reducing contrast) and doing a little more sculpting on the areas I wanted to force rivers. The only place it really didn't work was in the south swamp area, and the southeast peninsula where you can see a bit of a rut moving nw to se. Also, I probably should have spent more time beefing up my mountains, they look a little sparse and thin.

Anyway, I wanted to personally thank you for taking the time to make such an incredibly detailed tutorial. Any chance we can get your techniques on labeling? LOL, that's my next step.

[arsheesh]

Really awesome tutorial Arsheesh...though I have to admit I was pulling my hair out with Wilbur, mostly trying to get rivers where I want them... The trouble I was having with Wilbur is that it wasn't making good rivers...it kept making these terribly short "wisps". My solution was to go back to Gimp and tone down the Land Clouds layer (reducing contrast) and doing a little more sculpting on the areas I wanted to force rivers. The only place it really didn't work was in the south swamp area, and the southeast peninsula where you can see a bit of a rut moving nw to se.

Anyway, I wanted to personally thank you for taking the time to make such an incredibly detailed tutorial. Any chance we can get your techniques on labeling? LOL, that's my next step.

Yeah getting rivers to correspond to a previously existing map is one of the trickiest things to do when using Wilbur. The method you described is pretty much how I handle it, but it can be very time consuming. I'm really glad that the tutorial was helpful to you, your results turned out very nicely (great work!). As to labels, it seems to me that someone here once wrote up a walk-through on this, but darned if I can find it. However I think RobA has in in one or two of his tutorials discussed how to place text on a path (to make curved text) in GIMP and in Inkscape. I've thought about creating a sort of basic 101 level "how to" that describes things such as this and how to create icons and such. However sadly my plate is full at the moment and I don't think I'll be able to do pursue this for some time.

Cheers,
-Arsheesh

[zukeprime]

Arsheesh, I'm trying to develop a specific technique for making cliffs using your method. I think it's working ok, but wanted to see if you've got a better technique. First my starting experimental picture.


Just a succession of gray colors in the general shape of a cliff, with a difference cloud layer mixed in.

Import into wilbur and run noise, fill, and precipiton results in this


Ignore the scraggly edges...just playing around. I think it looks ok, but the hard drop off causes weird color anomalies in the gradient map, i.e. the hard green line. I think I can utilize this for my mapping project, but wanted to ping you or anyone else on a different or better technique?

Oh...forgot to add, I used both the BUMP layer and an added emboss layer, both set to overlay. Played around with the transparencies until I got the "pop" I wanted. Merged them together when I was happy with it. On hindsight I think its perhaps a little too harsh.

I think I can implement this into your tutorial flow during the blending phase. Instead of blending directly onto the LAND BUMPS layer, use a transparent layer on top to do the blending. Then, you can cut a 'hard edge' on your cliff area, with a distinct light (top of cliff) and dark (bottom of cliff) transition. I'll see if it works.