Making Fractal lines in GIMP

[Cool as a Cucumber]

Heres quickie steps. Start with some terrain, generate glow colored version, blur it a lot, select original land and paste on top. Again, this is my super quick attempt and probably needs more finesse but thats it basically.

Oh, I see. Actually, I was looking to make the glow to be inside the borders like in the picture I linked, not outside. That's why I was confused.

[Redrobes]

Same process but cut out the sea and paste back on instead of the land so that the glow goes into the land instead.

I think you need to do this on layers and mask each region out one by one and add in the glow a little at the end. But yeah its basically take the shape, blur it, mask out off the shape so that your left with just the blur that went into it and put in as a layer. Maybe multiply it with a constant color like red to get a red glow.

[Ascension]

This can be done in PS, and quite easily too. I stumbled upon it while experimenting in my secret lab last year. Filter-render-clouds (pic1). Filter-artistic-cutout. Filter-stylize-find edges. It produces what you see in pic 2; looks like contour lines. Even easier, is what's in pic 3, same clouds but then Filter-stylize-trace contour; makes a continent outline.

[Cool as a Cucumber]

I really hate to sound like I'm beating a dead horse, but making continents was never a problem thanks to FM8. What I need is to be able to draw a line in GIMP or Photoshop, and then have it becoming 'fractaled'.

[Ascension]

Don't know of any way to do just a line. The only thing I can think of is to draw a white shape on a black background. Yer gonna say, "I need a line" but hold on, we'll make the black and white edge become a line. In PS hit the filter-pixellate-crystalize, set the size around 24, then repeat this process at lower increments (12, then 6, then 3). Adjust the brightness all the way up, (image-adjustments-brightness/contrast)...this creates a random shape based on the rough white shape we started with. If it's too pointy or spikey then hit filter-noise-median and set that anywhere between 3-10 and this will round off the points. Delete the black (select-color range=black, hit the delete key). Now since we just have our white shape left we turn the opacity of the layer all the way down to zero and then add a layer style of stroke and there you have a random black line. It's kind of long but if you turn it into an action then it's way easy...draw a shape hit the button.

[Cool as a Cucumber]

Don't know of any way to do just a line. The only thing I can think of is to draw a white shape on a black background. Yer gonna say, "I need a line" but hold on, we'll make the black and white edge become a line. In PS hit the filter-pixellate-crystalize, set the size around 24, then repeat this process at lower increments (12, then 6, then 3). Adjust the brightness all the way up, (image-adjustments-brightness/contrast)...this creates a random shape based on the rough white shape we started with. If it's too pointy or spikey then hit filter-noise-median and set that anywhere between 3-10 and this will round off the points. Delete the black (select-color range=black, hit the delete key). Now since we just have our white shape left we turn the opacity of the layer all the way down to zero and then add a layer style of stroke and there you have a random black line. It's kind of long but if you turn it into an action then it's way easy...draw a shape hit the button.

At that point I might as well draw it in Fractal Mapper and screencap it..

[Greason Wolfe]

Not sure how much this will help, but you might take a look at RobA's "Creating an Artistic Regional Map . . . " tutorial for GIMP (original thread : http://www.cartographersguild.com/showthread.php?t=1142 ). With just a tiny bit of alteration, it might be able to accomplish what it sounds like you are looking for.

GW

[msa]

At that point I might as well draw it in Fractal Mapper and screencap it..

Can't you save the FM screen as an image? My GM uses autorealms for mapping, which has a fractal line/shape tool like you describe. To pretty it up in gimp, I just took his landmasses and saved them as a BMP in the resolution I needed (7200x4800 and 3600x2400). Then I brought it into GIMP to do all the artistic stuff.

There isn't a GIMP tool like that that I know of. You might get some traction out of select->distort but I haven't been satisfied with it. When I need a fractal-looking line, I usually draw it by hand