WIP using RobA's GIMP Tutorial

[RobA]

The other tip is to set your environment settings up correctly for your machine. I think the defaults are way too low.

I run on a AMD Turion64X2 with 2GB Ram. Here are my settings:



Tile Cache is the biggie, and set at 1/2 physical memory (but could go even higher depending on what else you do at the same time)

-Rob A>

[Karro]

When editing on older hardware, one tip that can work well is to do all your layer work on smallish sections (512x512), then flatten a copy and paste it into a single layered larger image for your final product. I'm not sure how GIMP handles its layers internally, but try this trick and see how it works for you.

The other tip is to set your environment settings up correctly for your machine. I think the defaults are way too low.

I run on a AMD Turion64X2 with 2GB Ram. Here are my settings:

Tile Cache is the biggie, and set at 1/2 physical memory (but could go even higher depending on what else you do at the same time)

-Rob A>

Thanks for the pointers. My laptop isn't really all that old (it's a dual core pentium with, I think, 2 gig of RAM and a 512MB video card... but it's running Vista, so a lot of that gets sucked up by the OS; sadly the comp was a gift so I didn't have a choice in OSs), but it runs a little slow. I'll take a look at the environment settings today to try to make sure it's set up optimally.

I was thinking about cutting up the final product into chunks and see what I can do. It may not be easy, since the continents and island chains kind of make an interwoven mesh over much of the world map. I tried to make the continent placement look natural and organic.

[Redrobes]

Even with Vista that ought to be easily enough to hold a large image. 7K x 3K is 80Mb or thereabouts in memory and even if you had 10 layers and some undo that would be only be about a 1Gb. Theres probably something else at play here like anti virus or something else thats thrashing your system. You should look at your processes and see how much CPU and memory they are all burning.

[Karro]

Even with Vista that ought to be easily enough to hold a large image. 7K x 3K is 80Mb or thereabouts in memory and even if you had 10 layers and some undo that would be only be about a 1Gb. Theres probably something else at play here like anti virus or something else thats thrashing your system. You should look at your processes and see how much CPU and memory they are all burning.

Ah yes... antivirus... I didn't even think of that. Thanks!

I'll bet if I shut that down, at least while working on maps, that ought to help at least some.

[Redrobes]

Maybe - try it by all means but its better to just know. Press ctrl alt del and get the task manager button and use that and look it up. Better yet is to use the sys internals version :-

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/s.../bb896653.aspx

which has a little more info. Actually the whole sys internals suite is excellent but its a power users set of tools. The process viewer is pretty easy tho. It should just tell you who is burning all of your resources.

If it is an anti virus issue it will be with the file touched scan. Every time a file is read or written it scans it. Very slow - might not be worth it.

[Karro]

A few additional WIP images.

Following RobA's technique as near as I can follow, I add the continent, improve the grass, and add dirt:


First layer of grass



Improved grass with textures



Dirt


Next up: I tackle mountains!

Thoughts?

One thing I notice: now that the land is down over the ocean, I see that the whispy white-blue coastal waters all moved to the right side. Is there any way to get it equally whispy on both sides?

[RobA]

One thing I notice: now that the land is down over the ocean, I see that the whispy white-blue coastal waters all moved to the right side. Is there any way to get it equally whispy on both sides?

Think you missed a second displacement map, use the same seed and negate both the x and y you used the first time.


RE: virus scanning - you should be able to exclude real time scanning from the gimp.exe process, and the subdirectory that gimp used for caching. This should speed things up.

-Rob A>

[Karro]

Think you missed a second displacement map, use the same seed and negate both the x and y you used the first time.


RE: virus scanning - you should be able to exclude real time scanning from the gimp.exe process, and the subdirectory that gimp used for caching. This should speed things up.

-Rob A>

I think you're right. I don't recall doing a second displacement map. I'll have to go back and see what I can do!

I'm going to need to develop some power user skills so I can better manage my antivirus and memory useage.