Great little tutorial, working through this and the regional map one of yours RobA. I am how ever running in to issues with the mountain making. Not sure why but every time I try to make a mountain i end up with a halo around the range. It's obviously from the early steps where we use a gaussian blur on the first layer but I just can not seem to replicate your results. I will try again in the morning on a fresh map and post my results.
I was just going through the tutorials again, looking for those that I REALY want to try when I actually have the time to put more that twenty minutes on mapping. When I looked through this one (again for the umpteenth time) I noticed a few things that beg the question "what version of Gimp are you using here, or what plug-ins do you have on it?" The two in particular are the Stencil Ops menu and the Gradient Preview you have in the Toolbox beside the Foreground/background display. What does the Screen Ops menu allow you to do? Is it an add on or rolled into a newer version? Where do I find it? ect, ect.
Oh, and Congrats on yet another well deserved scroll.
Art Critic = Someone with the Eye of an Artist, Words of a Bard, and the Talent of a Rock.
Please take my critiques as someone who Wishes he had the Talent
If you have a big flat area it is because you left a big spot all white. So yes, you have to adjust the curves down until you get just a small peak if that is what you want. I'm not exactly sure what the reference to ridges is, but the noise generator included with GIMP leaves diagonal striations. Use Felimage to get away from that. If you want to alter the color of your mountains you need to make a new color layer and mask it to fit your mountain shape. If the mountains are essentially a 50% gray bump map/embossed layer set on overlay it will show the color of the layer underneath, whatever it is.
you can also use MathMap (I like the flexibility, I don't much like how it sometimes crashes under Windows -- doesn't take GIMP with it, but it's still annoying. OTOH, being able to build complex generators and save them for later use is awfully nice).
As for the color, I usually take the heightmap, duplicate the layer (so I don't lose the heightmap in case I need it later, this step is destructive) and apply gradient color to it, usually going brown to a very pale grey (HTML #dddddd). If you go to white, you'll lose the ability to bumpmap, this pale grey is just enough you can still see them.
I can get the shape okay, but they end up just being green. I tired to make a new layer and mask it and use a gradient map, but it comes out looking like crap.
I'll keep trying.
what colors are you using? If I'm following RobA's artistic regional map tutorial and using the colors there I might use one of the darker dirt colors as low and #dddddd as high, then apply a mask to it. I might also use the same dirt color above that (masked to the mountain shape again) and set the layer to 'soft light' mode. You can see the results at http://www.kjd-imc.org/2010/10/22/va...-reinterpeted/ (yeah, I kind of pooched blending the edges of the mountains, but I can live with it)
I can't;; I don't know why. I did all things equal to you, and result is always different. In my case, when adjusting curve or level, there are even no histogram. Nothing. Ah, this painting things really killing me;;
Hmm, thanks for the tutorial, using it right now for my map.
Howdy all. Total noob here: to digital mapping, to gimp, and first post. I want to join the praise-a-thon and thank Rob for his wonderful tutorials. Like a number of others, I got hung up on the mountain stages in both the Artistic Regional Map and the Simple Mt. tutorials. I liked the look of the latter best so I stuck with it. The "Aha" moment came when I realized that one tiny step--intuitive to those with more experience--had been assumed but not written. Starting in Step 7, I realized that I had to "select>>none" in order to make the rest of the steps work. I didn't see that written down but the screen grabs used clearly show no selection. This may very well be a no-brainer to the more experienced here but it hung me up for hours! Thanks again to Rob and to the group. There's a great deal of inspiration here and once I got mine to work I was kicking my heels.
I've attached my first map Geardagas. My Mts look a little "young" because I added a little gaussian noise at the "blur" level thinking it would help feather into the rest of the map better. I'm happy with them just because I made it through to the end and didn't get hung up. I believe I'll do better next time. On to rivers, forests, and towns!
I have a problem... On step 5, whenever I try to fill in the Feathered Selection with a rendered cloud, it completely disregards the "Feathered" part and does the original selection.
How can I fix this?
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