October Entry: The Desert Reclaims her Own

[jfrazierjr]

Thanks, I'm still feeling my way through how to do things with gimp, I'm only barely starting to get layer masks

Learn masks and learn them well... they will drastically improve your control and flexability. For a test, do this:

• new image
• Fill with a texture
• New layer filled with another texture
• Add a layer mask 100 black so your original texture shows through.
• With the layer mask selected (click the mask thumbnail), use a paint brush set to pure white and about 40% opacity, paint the mask white which will allow stuff to show through.

This is an excellent technique for blending two or more colors/textures together that is totally non destructive. If you show to much of the top texture or color, just change the FG color to white and erase part of the mask. For the above test, I would suggest using Rock_Blueish_Blu_kp.bmp as the base background texture and one of the grass textures as the top layer. This will allow you to produce an "overgrown" city with some base streets and your vegitation on top.

The other GREAT thing about doing it this way is that you can change the textures used in 2 seconds by draging a new texture onto the correct layer and still have the same basic shape preserved 100% because the mask it doing all the heavy lifting instead of your hand brush strokes.

Attached are some samples using the same background and different top layers. It took about 2 seconds to change each top layer texture and yet the location of the top layer stays constant in each since the mask is doing all the work. This is a great way to blend colors or textures and still be flexible to change out the color/texture and maintian the same shape without any tweaking to get the shape back. I originally figured this out from something in RobA's tutorial where he did it months ago, but forgot about it until I watched Butch's (zombienirvana) tutorials on utube last night.