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Welcome to the Guild!
I look forward to seeing your maps... fantasy world maps are by far my favorite!
There are many good GIMP tutorials on the forum and I hope you get as much out of this community as I am...
-Chris
Introductions abound
Hello there,
My name's Stephen, though I've been posting under the "Karro" handle for years now, so why change now? (You can find me at RPG.net under the same name, but I haven't gamed in years now, and consequently haven't posted there in years either.)
I happened across this place while searching for GIMP tutorials to help me learn the program while I work on a fantasy world map. I've been drawing fantasy maps since I was a wee lad, and I'd done a number of maps of a particular imagined world (primarily paper-based). A couple years ago I decided to start recreating this world from the ground up, and using some of the maps I'd drawn when I was younger as rough guides. Using a free pdf I found on world-building I tried to learn a little about plate tectonics and how they form the world and affect the shape of the world above them. So, I sketched up a quick design of interlocking plates, gave a rough indication of the transforming, subducting, and diverging plates, and then placed my continents on top of them.
I decided that I wanted to be able to produce several kinds of maps of the same world without having to redraw the world each time, so I decided to try to work on the computer where, having in the past used Paint Shop Pro and having been introduced to the concept of Layers, I thought I could best perform this task. So, recently, I started redrawing the rough designs I did on paper in GIMP, starting with a basic outline of the tectonic plates, and then adding layers for some general continent outlines, and the ocean. I was manually drawing and blurring the shorelines of these otherwise featureless continents (I don't have a wacom tablet or anything similar, and it was taking forever, and I hadn't even tried forests or mountains yet) when I thought "There must be a better way... I'm not taking full advantage of GIMP's tools". So... after fruitlessly messing with some GIMP filters (like edge detect, and a cool polar map feature that I can use later to produce polar-oriented maps if I so desire), I decided to hit up Ye Olde Internet for better answers. It directed me here (unless I want to spend too much time watching video tuts... but I like static tutorial presentations better, so I can more easily refer back to them).
So, I already started fooling around with RobA's tutorial on regional fantasy maps, and I'm trying to think of ways some of the same techniques might be applied to a world-map scale. It looks like this is an excellent community, here, and I'm glad to have found it.
Welcome to the Guild!
I look forward to seeing your maps... fantasy world maps are by far my favorite!
There are many good GIMP tutorials on the forum and I hope you get as much out of this community as I am...
-Chris
@BHfuturist Check out my Video Tutorials & Vault of Free Map Elements
Unless otherwise stated in the post, all of my artwork is released into the Public Domain.
Welcome Stephen! RobA's tuts should help you get started fairly quickly. Looking forward to seeing some of your stuff.
My Finished Maps
Works in Progress(or abandoned tests)
My Tutorials:
Explanation of Layer Masks in GIMP
How to create ISO Mountains in GIMP/PS using the Smudge tool
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Unless otherwise stated by me in the post, all work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 3.0 United States License.
Welcome Stephen - Glad you found us. I hope you find the tuts useful.
et al...Originally Posted by rpgmapmaker
I think I definitely will. While I'm at work today, I spent my lunch break on my laptop fiddling around with some sample images and following and learning from some tuts I'd downloaded from here. It was very exciting and I'm learning a lot, already!
Welcome aboard, Stephen. I look forward to seeing your fantasy maps.
Cheers,
Tim
Paratime Design Cartography
"Do infants have as much fun in infancy as adults do in adultery?" - Groucho Marx
Welcome Karro, Boy, with all the GIMP users maybe I should start looking to GIMP to do mapping and drop CC3
Daniel the Neon Knight: Campaign Cartographer User
Never use a big word when a diminutive one will suffice!
Any questions on CC3? Post them with CC3 in the Subject Line!
MY 'FAMOUS' CC3 MAPS: Thunderspire; Pyramid of Shadows; King of the Trollhaunt Warrens; Demon Queen's Enclave
What can I say? It's free! Right now, that's the right price point!Welcome Karro, Boy, with all the GIMP users maybe I should start looking to GIMP to do mapping and drop CC3
Besides that, I understand it's really powerful (if I just learn to use it properly, that is)
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