September Entry: The Broken Coast

[ravells]

Those mountains are fantastic! How did you do them? Great work!

[jfrazierjr]

Those mountains are fantastic! How did you do them? Great work!

Thanks,

It's a variation on RobA's mountain tutorial in GIMP (the video one). I have to admit that this probably takes about a good hour. I expect once someone has done it a few times, they can probably get it done in 20-30 minutes dependong how many mountains they do.

I will need to make a tutorial, because honestly, since I did the first time in the Playing with Mountains thread 3-4 months ago, I totally forgot how I did it. I will get something up soon for a real tut, but assuming I did not miss any steps:

1. Make selections(s) just like in RobA' tutorial. on a 50% grey layer
2. set the foreground color to white and background color to 50% grey
3. Use the gradiant tool set to angular gradiant.
4. This should give you white at the top and fading to grey at the bottom
5. Solid Noise about 20px (this depends on your original resolution though!)
6. Gaussian blur around 5-6px
7. IN this case, I took a med-small white fuzzy brush (using my pen for size and width differences) and "redrew" where I really wanted by ridgeline to show.
8. The real trick here is to use the smudge tool. You might want to increase the size of your selection by 20px or so to give you room to work.
9. Using the Smudge tool and a fairly small brush, go wild. I think I used a rate of about 80%. Using a pen makes this 10 times easier as you have a lot more control using the pressure sensitivity. make criss crosses, variuous angles "up the sides of the mountains" and down from the peak. Leave the ridgle line "mostly intact", but in a few places mess it up real good, especially if the messed up areas are a ways apart.
10. Run another Gaussian Blur of about 3 px
11. Turn off the selection.
12. Bump Map the layer against itself (or bump map another layer to this) using very high Elevation (80%+) Depth at Max, Ambient at Max.
13. Bump Map the layer again, this time changing Elevation downward to the 50-60 range and Ambient to 0. Look at the whole thing.
14. Set layer mode to Overlay (or, I like Hard Light) right about your ground color (brown usually)
15. You may have some "rings" from the G Blur, it so, carefully run the blur tool around to softend up the edge.
16. For a special bit of extra diminsion, you could select the layer below this one and use the Burn tool to lightly(no pun intended) darken up you shadow side, though I have not dont this yet. Ditto with dodge on the other side.

Steps 8-13 are where the try/undo comes into play. It takes a lot of practice getting to the point where they look half way decent. The smudge tool looks bad until you get the bump maps applied and it's hard to tell when you messed up the smudge strokes until you have done the bump maps.

I THINK this is somewhat close to how I did this. When time permits, I will do it up into something resembling a proper tutorial.