[Award Winner] Using the mosaic filter to make towns in Gimp

[bryguy]

love the tutorial! and I think that the random village shapes look cool




btw, what did you do for that last pic? it looks awesome

[torstan]

I'm glad you liked it. I'd urge all that read through it to rate it, if you like it or not.

The steps I took to make it look pretty are:
1. Add a parchment texture as the background.
2. Change the layers above in the following way:
a. Duplicate the layer
b. Set the blend mode of the bottom of the two copies to overlay
c. Reduce the opacity of the top layer to between 50-80% depending on the result

This softens the colours and blends the colour scheme together a little more. Now to create some light and dark regions:

3. Create a new layer over the map and set the mode to overlay.
4. Fill with precisely 50% grey (you will see no effect at this stage as 50% grey does nothing for overlay layers. Don't worry, it will be important later).
5. Go to the dodge/burn tool and take a nice large fuzzy brush. Make sure you have the tool set to burn and the range set to shadow:

6. Now run the brush over those regions that you would like to be dark - essentially hill-sides away from your sun.
7. Now switch to dodge, and set the range to midtones.
8. Run the brush over those regions that are in the light - hill tops and the sides of hills facing the sun.

You will now have soft highlights and shadows on your map. This will give the impression of hills. Repeat these steps to get deeper shadows and feel free to use the smudge tool with a large fuzzy brush to smooth out any shadows that are too dark.

If you set your overlay layer to normal you'll see that you've really got a grey layer with lighter and darker regions on it. For the map above, my overlay layer looks like this:


That's all there is to it.

I've also uploaded the .xcf file in a zip for people who want to see the breakdown of all the layers and blending modes for that final image. I hope its useful!

village2.zip

[Sagenlicht]

Nice tutorial torstan

Repped and rated

[torstan]

Thanks for the bump and the 5 stars That's quite a thread ressurection you achieved there.

[Sagenlicht]

Heh - I had close to no time in december, so I try to catch up a bit

[Sagenlicht]

Torstan, I tried your tutorial, but I got a dumb question:

I get some artifacts where buildings used to be (see attachement). Do you know what I am doing wrong? Is it the threshold or the way I do the selection?

I do NOT follow your tutorial 1 by 1, I create the color layer by filling it with a color then add a new layer with plasma, desaturate it, set it to overlay and merge it down, giving some color variations for my town. This is creating a for more uniform color variation than yours and I am aware that it aint that good, but for testing its faster.

[Sagenlicht]

Hmm torstan,

I did some GIMP scripting on your tutorial.

Attached is a GIMP script that tries automate your tutorial. Maybe you could try it and tell me how do you like it and what could be improved?

Ofc, everyone else can download it as well but keep in mind that it aint perfect yet

[Vandy]

Hi, All.

Here is torstan's excellent tutorial as a PDF document.

Regards,

Gary

[Black Tower of Time]

Thank's, nice work with the PDF version especial that you added a Table of Content too.