WIP using RobA's GIMP Tutorial

[jfrazierjr]

Alright, so I tried out Mountains, Forests and Rivers on the second part of RobA's tutorial.

The first time trying mountains was a disaster.

Yea, my first couple of attempts came out crappy also. This is one of the reasons I started playing around with some other ways to do mountain fields. Think I finally have something I like....

The forests didn't come out super great, either.

Try DanChops mini tut on this thread: http://www.cartographersguild.com/showthread.php?t=2087 I really like the way this effect looks in the end. He needs to make a proper tutorial out of it.
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Anyway, I deleted all the mountains, went back and tried again. I followed the basic tutorial as much as possible, but even by duplicating the mountain bumpmap layer, I couldn't get the same "pop" that RobA (and others) seem to get, nor the same variability in peak height.

Here's the second try:


Then, I decided to try out RobA's other Mountain Tutorial in the context of this map:


Then, for kicks and giggles, I combined the two. I allowed one of the two identical bumpmaps to overlay on top of the second mountain style:


Then I tried it with both duplicate bumpmaps on the second style:


Overall, I think I like the two combined, with only one extra bumpmap overlay, the most.

Yep, some of those look pretty good!

Didn't try redoing the forest yet, but started to try to carve out rivers. Issues: the forests completely cover the rivers in many places. I'll have to pick the brains of those who have figured out how to carve the rivers through the forests (and maybe later those who carve rivers through mountain canyons), and play with the rivers more to make them pop as well.

Select all your water (rivers and seas/oceans), create a layer mask (optional but recommended), run the bevel tool with 1-2 px. Make SURE you turn off the "make a copy" or whatever so you get it in the same layer. This will create that cut effect nicely. Then, apply the layer mask on whatever layers(forests, etc) and they all get cut out to make room for the river. Personally, I plan to play with adding ANOTHER forest layer with just a few small "bits" on top to cover the river in a few tiny places to better simulate real terrain.

Joe

[torstan]

That's a great run through of the different mountain methods. The second o last is looking really nice.

[RobA]

I like the combination, too! It generates the ridgeline that was really missing in the original style. Thanks for experimenting and sharing this with everyone!

-Rob A>

[Karro]

That's a great run through of the different mountain methods. The second o last is looking really nice.

I like the combination, too! It generates the ridgeline that was really missing in the original style. Thanks for experimenting and sharing this with everyone!

-Rob A>

Thanks! I agree, I really like the way it came out.

Then, using DanChop's modification of RobA's forests in the big tutorial, I think I managed to get some fairly decent looking forests to go with them.

Still need to make some improvements (rivers? Bevels?)


Comments, suggestions for improvement?

[Karro]

Okay, I think I've made some great improvements, so far. I learned several cool things working on these steps, like locking the alpha chanel. Plus, I finally figured out how to do a very basic bevel--it took a while, and it's very easy to overdo it.

I'm not sure about how I cut the river through the forest. The process I used was: first I duplicated the river mask I did on the grass layer for each of the forest layers. This made the river look flat on top of the forest, so I made a copy of the mask, widened the river in the copy by about a half dozen pixels (via the grow selection), then blurred it by a few pixels, and applied the result as the mask for each of the forest layers.

I tried something else for the coastline. The bevel was making the whole coast pop. I toned this down by adjusting the opacity of the layer that was making the bevel. Then, I took an edge detection of one of the original black-and-white land masks (I happened to already have one of these), created a new layer filled with the Coastline color (the pale tan from the cities color palette RobA offers in the original tutorial) and masked it with the edge mask. I fiddled with the layer settings, and ultimately settled on Soft Light at full opacity. This helped tone down the bevel on the land mass's coast edge, but maintained the bevel for the rivers.

Then added cities and roads. I just used a round brush for the cities, chose and earthy red (since I used to make cities with red dots on my old maps...). For roads followed RobA's instructions exactly.

For this map, I also added the underwater bumpmap and the top-layer cloud overlay.



Let me know what you think!

It's been a joy so far working on this. I wish I had more time to update more quickly.

[torstan]

Those are looking great.

[Karro]

Those are looking great.

Thanks! I'm quite proud of the progess so far. When compared to the state of my maps prior to starting on this tutorial, I've come a long way in the past couple weeks.

[Karro]

Yea, my first couple of attempts came out crappy also. This is one of the reasons I started playing around with some other ways to do mountain fields. Think I finally have something I like....


Try DanChops mini tut on this thread: http://www.cartographersguild.com/showthread.php?t=2087 I really like the way this effect looks in the end. He needs to make a proper tutorial out of it.

Yep, some of those look pretty good!

Select all your water (rivers and seas/oceans), create a layer mask (optional but recommended), run the bevel tool with 1-2 px. Make SURE you turn off the "make a copy" or whatever so you get it in the same layer. This will create that cut effect nicely. Then, apply the layer mask on whatever layers(forests, etc) and they all get cut out to make room for the river. Personally, I plan to play with adding ANOTHER forest layer with just a few small "bits" on top to cover the river in a few tiny places to better simulate real terrain.

Joe

Thanks for pointing out DanChops' technique. I think I managed to make it work fairly well.

Now, stupid question time: how do you do this bevel. I looked and looked and looked, but the only reference I could find in GIMP to Bevel was in the "Filters>Decor" menu for "Add Bevel". That did not do what I was looking for.