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Thread: Neweastland

  1. #1
    Mimi
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    Map Neweastland

    In absence of a proper introduction in the appropriate place I thought it would be more meaningful to break the ice by posting a map.

    This is a map of a region called Neweastland, it's a for a fantasy setting with a colonial theme and is my first substantial attempt at creating a terran campaign map. It was made with the goal of beng, clear, bright, easily readable and a tad cartoonish. I think it does that pretty well. My main quandary is the geography, whilst I wasn't trying to make anything that was particularly accurate or realistic I think I let myself down on the quantity and length of rivers.

    The map was made almost entierly in GIMP, I drew the basic geography by hand, added mountains by a process that ammounts to Lasso tool, solid noise, border selection, gaussian blur, cranking up the contrast, 00000 to alpha, emboss, then I painted the terrain with the airbrush tool, added some patterns to certain areas to give definition to the terrain, splashed some forests on then jammed a pile of icons on top. This version is indexed to 256 colours to make it smaller.

    The text was a freaking pain, I accidently deleted entire sets of names about 3 times and had to redo the manually. For my first real try I'm pretty pleased with it.

    What do you guys think?
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  2. #2
    Publisher Facebook Connected bartmoss's Avatar
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    I like it. Good colors, the "stretch" effect in the sea is interesting, I like the mountains. I honestly can't find anything to criticize. Good work, and welcome aboard.

  3. #3

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    Great map Mimi!

    I see the water is the stock pattern, but so nicely distorted I could barely tell. How did you manage that, with iwarp, or some other process?

    Also, I like the icons. Are they something you created yourself?

    Regarding text, I have completely switched to inkscape for adding text to maps. I import the final map as an image into inkscape then create all the text on a new layer, then exporting the text as a transparent svg back into gimp as a layer for final effects.

    Nice first post, have some rep (And it is good to see another gimp user here )

    -Rob A>

  4. #4
    Community Leader Facebook Connected Steel General's Avatar
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    Welcome Aboard!

    This is very good for your first try, and since you uploaded a map in your first post have some more rep *bonk*

    I highly suggest that you take a look at the various tutorials that have been created for GIMP, they'll help you learn some other techniques that may inspire/help you in the development of your mapping style.
    My Finished Maps | My Challenge Maps | Still poking around occasionally...

    Unless otherwise stated by me in the post, all work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 3.0 United States License.



  5. #5
    Guild Journeyer Vandy's Avatar
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    Praise What a wonderful map!

    Hello, Mimi.

    First of all, welcome to the Cartographers' Guild.

    Second, what a wonderful map you've created. I should want something as beautiful for my first try! I really like your layout, use of symbols and icons -- pretty much everything.

    Looking forward to chatting with you more.

    Regards,

    Gary
    In the end you will see, you is you and me is me.
    © May 29, 1980

  6. #6
    Guild Journeyer woekan's Avatar
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    Very nice first try! Great mountains and good forest!

  7. #7
    Mimi
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    What an awfully warm welcome. Thanks for your comments and advice. I have looked over the tutorials section and there seem to be some useful lumps of knowledge that could be sifted out of that immense pile of information. I'll certainly go through it at some point.

    To answer questions:

    - Yes I made the Icons
    - Indeed, the water is the stock pattern modified with IWarp, I did have a go with polar coordinates, but that didn't work out.
    - I did consider Inskape for the text and would have used it if not for the fact that the text tool always seems to behave oddly for me, you can set a default size, font and style, but I have no idea how to set a default fill colour or stroke style or if you can at all. Manually changing the text colour for every single label on this map would have been torture, so I went for GIMP and a thousand million layers of one word names instead. If someone knows how to aid me with this the I would appreciate any help I could get.

  8. #8
    Community Leader jfrazierjr's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by Mimi View Post
    Manually changing the text colour for every single label on this map would have been torture, so I went for GIMP and a thousand million layers of one word names instead. If someone knows how to aid me with this the I would appreciate any help I could get.
    Not sure if this will help you or not, but what I do is to create my text labels with the correct font and convert each text layer to a path. Delete the text layers (since I don't need them anymore and merge down all of the text paths to a single path. Path to Selection, create a new transparent layer, and fill with color. This also makes it super easy if you want to duplicate said layer and put another color below with a blur to get some nice glowy text. It take time to do it this way, but you can save yourself tons of layers by using paths and merging them down when you know you have everything you need done.

    Not sure if that helps or not with what you were trying to avoid....
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    My Finished Maps
    Works in Progress(or abandoned tests)
    My Tutorials:
    Explanation of Layer Masks in GIMP
    How to create ISO Mountains in GIMP/PS using the Smudge tool
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    Unless otherwise stated by me in the post, all work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 3.0 United States License.

  9. #9
    Community Leader Facebook Connected torstan's Avatar
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    My approach in Gimp is to create the million layers of text labels. Then use the move tool with 'move selected layer' selected to get all the text in the right places. Then hide all non-text layers. Right click on the layers dialogue and go to Merge Visible Layers... That will get you all you text in one layer. Then you can mess with this to get layer styles and so on. Generally I duplicate the layer, invert the colour and gaussian blur it. I move this below the original text layer and it gives a nice outer glow. I also drop the opacity of the original layer a little.

    Hope that helps.

  10. #10
    Mimi
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    Quote Originally Posted by torstan View Post
    My approach in Gimp is to create the million layers of text labels. Then use the move tool with 'move selected layer' selected to get all the text in the right places. Then hide all non-text layers. Right click on the layers dialogue and go to Merge Visible Layers... That will get you all you text in one layer. Then you can mess with this to get layer styles and so on. Generally I duplicate the layer, invert the colour and gaussian blur it. I move this below the original text layer and it gives a nice outer glow. I also drop the opacity of the original layer a little.

    Hope that helps.
    This is in fact exactly what I did except I used a drop shadow rather than a glow effect.

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