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

[arsheesh]

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... I think I can utilize this for my mapping project, but wanted to ping you or anyone else on a different or better technique?

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.

I recently had to make a plateau in one of my maps and I used a method almost exactly similar to the one you've employed here. Just added an additional layer, rendered fractal clouds in it, used the curves function (under "Colors") to lighten the clouds, isolated the boundary areas of the plateau and deleted the rest, and then blended the edges of the plateau a bit. So yes, I think you are on the right track here. Be curious to see an update of this.

Cheers,
-Arsheesh

[zukeprime]

Thanks Arsheesh. I'm still trying to figure this out. I've redone the map about 2-3 times, trying to get it just right in Wilbur. Here's the latest iteration:


No matter how hard I try, the swamp lands in the south start looking too hand drawn. Oh well...

My mind is blown at the moment...I think I'm just going to go with it, and start putting in the towns, etc.

[arsheesh]

Well perhaps the swamp-lands look a bit hand-drawn but I don't take that to be a problem. I think the map is really coming along nicely. You are doing great work.

Cheers,
-Arsheesh

[waldronate]

The critical part of getting rivers where you want them with Wilbur is to have a mask with the rivers baked into it. Starting with your initial CC3 map, I made a few masks:


Coast


Coast with waterways


Hills


Mountains

The basic process was:
1) Load Coast as select, add 100 to altitude, then add a mound 50 high.
2) Load coast with waterways and add 100 to altitude.
3) Repeat for Hills and mountains.
4) Reload Coast as a selection to bound the erosion effects.
5) Now add noise with a value of about 25.
6) Fill basins and incise flow.
7) Now 25ish rounds of precipiton erosion to smooth things out.
A few more rounds of steps from 2 through 7 (you may want to adjust the maximum values to get slightly different effects).


Result

[arsheesh]

Huh! I've never considered doing it that way before. I've got to try this now. Thanks for the walk-through Waldronate.

Cheers,
-Arsheesh

[zukeprime]

Thanks Waldronate. As you posted this, I was working through the Fun with Wilbur Volume 1 tutorial. I used a river mask on the previous post, but I didn't raise the mountain terrain, other than what I had already done in the GIMP height map. Let me play around with it.

[zukeprime]

ok...I think I'm getting somewhere. I really overdid the rivers on this one. Please don't laugh...and ignore the colors! It's really late and my eyes are busting out. Ha!

Base Image


River Mask


Hill Mask


Mtn Mask


Final Product


The only problem I see using such large noise and precipiton iterations is that I lost a lot of depth to the non-mountainous terrain. The rivers, however, come out really nice. Obviously, I turned it up to ELEVEN on the rivers, but I wanted to see what happened. Also, my choice of brush pattern (Acrylic 2) for the hill mask leaves an obvious mark.

Thanks for the help...I think I've got some good info to work with now.

[Thorf]

There are elements I really like in all of your maps in this thread, zukeprime. If I might make a suggestion, why don't you layer all the images and then use masks to blend the most interesting parts of each attempt at the map? You'll end up with a map with lots of great variety, as well as doing what you want it to do. Of course it will require some fiddling to get the heights to line up properly, but I think you could make a really nice map that way.

I have a question for you about this stage of your map:

Base Image


Final Product

The rocky hills in this map are really cool! I can't quite work out how they came about from the base image - can you remember what kind of processing you did to them to make them come out this way? Also, if you still have the height map for the final product at this stage, I'd love to see it too.

[waldronate]

One thing that the Eriond tutorial does is to incise flow to run rivers. You can also use Wilbur's Texture>>Other Maps>>River Flow tool to create a river map that you can drop on top of the terrain without having to carve the deep canyons all the way down to sea level. Learning the correct settings will take a bit of practice because the tool's effects vary a bit with the resolution of the image. More precipiton erosion will reduce the hard edges from the masks.

[zukeprime]

Yeah...one of the things I'm struggling with in this process is exporting a decent river map that I can use in GIMP as a mask. Exporting the height map is great, but the GIMP color picker tool at a threshold of 15 only gets the major low-lying rivers and ignores the higher rivers/glacial flows in the mountains. If I color pick those, I end up with half the mountain selected just based on the color delta.

Anyhoo, I tried using the River Map option in Wilbur, but I end up with thousands of little rivers. It still doesn't seem to work even after a healthy dose of erosion, noise, and fill basins. For example, right before my normal 'incise flow' I'll try to generate a river map, it fails to produce the rivers as expected. When I immediately go to incise flow, I get those nice rivers. Obviously I'm missing something. Let me correct myself, I actually did get a nice river pattern once, but it was extremely faint (1px?) and I can't reproduce that result.

BTW, waldronate: I really do appreciate your help. I thoroughly enjoy using Wilbur to produce realistic terrain, and combined with arsheesh's tutorial it really is fun. I'm also an FT3/CC3 customer, so thanks for helping dev so many great tools.