[Award Winner ] Creating an old-school map in Gimp.

[torstan]

And here is the same map imported into maptool, given dynamic lighting and being explored by an adventurer who found a statue with ruby eyes and decided it would be a good idea to prise one out. The statue shudders to life, an infernal glow in those ruby eyes and the hapless adventurer wishes he'd had a bit more respect for those annals of D&D history.....


Now obviously the labels shouldn't be visible to the players. That's why we kept them on another layer, so that by switching off the visibility of the layer (the little eye symbol beside the layer icon) we can hide them all. If we then save the map we get just the player view without any of the traps or secret doors visible:


Now obviously this was a light hearted tutorial harking back to a more innocent time of D&D, but the basic principles you've seen here are the same basic principles that go into making far prettier maps. The core of this is getting a good selection and finding a nice way to fill it. Clearly instead of using blue for your flood fill, you could use one of Gimp's built in textures - such as the granite texture. Suddenly you have a very different type of map. Something in fact that looks a little more like this:


But something like that is really something for another tutorial - and one by someone else as I need to get some dinner. Please feel free to ask any questions, or make comments - I will endeavour to answer them as best I can, or someone else here who is better qualified will be able to. I notice a couple of people have already chipped in with some very pertinent hints further up the thread. Thanks guys!

Oh, one final thing. Please star rate this thread with an honest rating for how useful this was. This will help other users see which threads are useful and which are not.

[töff]

harking back to a more innocent time of D&D

Burgers and fries and cherry pies! Things were simple and good back then. (You know the song.)

Very nice tute. Makes me want to learn whether I can give out rep.

[torstan]

I'm glad you liked it. And I did wonder who would jump on the diagonal corridors - they really are an aberration.

[McDeath]

I will have to try this. When i get a chance i will copy the tutorial down.

[jfrazierjr]

And here is the same map imported into maptool, given dynamic lighting and being explored by an adventurer who found a statue with ruby eyes and decided it would be a good idea to prise one out. The statue shudders to life, an infernal glow in those ruby eyes and the hapless adventurer wishes he'd had a bit more respect for those annals of D&D history.....

Heh... All töff has to do is run back into that 7(3??) foot wide corridor, and that big hugh monster can't get to him.

Joe

[Ghalev]

Bravo. A question, though (my GIMP-fu is nonexistent): can the Gimp provide this map with a bit of finishing stress? As it is, it looks very aggressively digital ... perfectly-sharp/crisp lines, symbols and labels.

In Photoshop, this could be amended pretty easily in the middle stages with a bit of screened noise, a soft blur, and a re-firming of the "spot ink" by adjusting the contrast - voila. What would be (if you have time) the comparable procedure for those of us just getting our toes wet in Gimp?

[torstan]

My guess is that it can, I'm just not sure exactly what you're trying to achieve. Could you post a before and after version of the photoshop effect and I'll see if I can patch together the same result in Gimp. I think I know what you're getting at but I'm not 100% sure.

[Ghalev]

My guess is that it can, I'm just not sure exactly what you're trying to achieve. Could you post a before and after version of the photoshop effect and I'll see if I can patch together the same result in Gimp. I think I know what you're getting at but I'm not 100% sure.

Ah, of course. The overall goal is to use a perfectly-clean digital image to create something that evokes the sense of a perfectly-clean printed one, by introducing some (relatively subtle) random variables in the crisp edges, some gentle blotting on the fonts and so on to suggest the normal imperfections in a 1980s printing process (rather than anything heavy like actual weathering).

I've assembled this sample pretty hastily (so hastily I forgot to add a grid - d'oh!) but it should get the idea across (especially the numerals).

[torstan]

Yep. Very simple really.

Take the final image which should really be a jpg file now. Open that up in Gimp. Now you want to use the colour select too, with a relatively high threshold - I used the following settings:


Now click on any white area, and you should get all the white areas selected. The threshold setting will determine how close the selected area is to the white/blue boundary.

Now create a new layer to play with. This should be transparent as before. We want to fuzz up the lines a bit. So go to Select->Distort... Now in this box I used the following settings:


After running this filter, you'll get a slightly fuzzy version of your previous outline. Now, fill this with white (if white is the background colour still, this is as easy as pressing ctrl-.) and your map will now look something like this:


How's that for you?

Obviously you can also fuzz the blue into the white areas. To do this, go to Select->Invert Selection (or ctrl-I). Then flood fill with our nice cyan colour (if cyan is still the foreground colour, this is just ctrl-,). I found that this was a bit too distressed so left that out of the above.

[Ghalev]

How's that for you?

Definitely close enough to start with; I can take it from there to get it exactly where I need it (more plate-blot/paper-bleed, mainly, to complement the grain and insure that no elements lose legibility).

Thanks very much. I like the look of Gimp, I just need to set aside a work-week sometime and immerse myself in it, get the feel of the controls ...