Reply With QuoteGood eye Ghostman, I hadn't even caught that.
Well Europe has a very broken coastline (compare it to Africa, which is a much larger landmass but has a shorter coastline!) so it's not like a fictional map needs to replicate it to that level. Even so I would agree that the coast in your map is a bit too smooth to look good.
There is another thing I see that you might want to improve in your future maps: when using the technique of blurring the layer masks (as you did on this map), you should take care to keep the elements from spilling over to the water. If you look closely, you can see that this has happened in the attached picture. The forests and the mountains in particular extend a visible blurred edge to the sea.
There is an easy way to fix it: after applying the blur, make a selection of the water-area, click on the mask of the layer, and fill the selection with black color. This way the blurs will disappear from the water areas but they will remain over the land areas.
Good eye Ghostman, I hadn't even caught that.
If the radiance of a thousand suns was to burst at once into the sky, that would be like the splendor of the Mighty One...I am become Death, the Shatterer of worlds.
-J. Robert Oppenheimer (father of the atom bomb) alluding to The Bhagavad Gita (Chapter 11, Verse 32)
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Thanks for your comments, hopefully know I know a few of those tricks I can do better next time, I actually started up the attached before I realised I had no real plans for it and nowhere to go (well I was going to try for a town by the bay type area mid map, but my few attempts were awful, so I think I need to start off with some small amount of hard landscape and build up from there.)
The only thing I am really unhappy with is the ring effect I have right at the bottom of the mountain
I do 2 things to eliminate those things, a low opacity eraser or a blur. Blurs tend to work best if the rings are being caused by a bevel or emboss.
If the radiance of a thousand suns was to burst at once into the sky, that would be like the splendor of the Mighty One...I am become Death, the Shatterer of worlds.
-J. Robert Oppenheimer (father of the atom bomb) alluding to The Bhagavad Gita (Chapter 11, Verse 32)
My Maps ~ My Brushes ~ My Tutorials ~ My Challenge Maps
If I blur will I not lose the definition on the ridges though? (or do you not mean blur the whole layer?)
I'm not familiar with GIMP but in Photoshop we have a blur brush so we can do spot blurring. You can also use the selection tool to make a selection then any blurring will only be inside of the selection, in Photoshop we also have the ability to feather out the selection so that it is not crisply defined.
If the radiance of a thousand suns was to burst at once into the sky, that would be like the splendor of the Mighty One...I am become Death, the Shatterer of worlds.
-J. Robert Oppenheimer (father of the atom bomb) alluding to The Bhagavad Gita (Chapter 11, Verse 32)
My Maps ~ My Brushes ~ My Tutorials ~ My Challenge Maps
Pretty sure there is a blur brush now I think about it, not sure about feathering, will have to have a dig around
Yep, you can blur in Gimp. There is a blur tool (it's called smudge and it looks like a hand) and you cna use it with any of the normal brushes. I'd set the opacity of the blur brush quite low and use a large fuzzy brush. Then rub it over the area you want to fix until it has smoothed it out.
Little correction- in Gimp the hand is smudge. Blur/Sharpen is actually the drop:Originally Posted by torstan
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Oops. You can use the smudge tool to spread out the sharp edges, but it is probably best to use the actual blur tool. Thanks for picking up my error Rob!
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