Reply With Quotehere it is with the blur.
Hmmm . . . Major LEE could you not shorten that up a bit. Instead of copy, move, copy, move, copy, move . . . until the shadow is big enough then merge them all; you can do it all in one step with the brush. (At least in GIMP you can.)
1) start as you start - a new layer underneath with the building shapes all filled in black.
2) ctrl-a, (select all), ctrl-c - (copy). Now the layer is in the clipboard.
3) Using your brush with the clipboard selected as your brush (it will be the first brush in the list) line up the brush with the image click then move in the direction you want your shadow and shift click.
EDIT: 4) blur.
GIMP will use the black houses as a brush and draw in a straight line from the click (under the houses) to the shift click.
I got this in about 30 seconds.
EDIT: I went back and tried it again timing it and doing this was faster than waiting for the drop shadow to run.
Last edited by Boethius61; 12-14-2009 at 06:13 PM.
here it is with the blur.
Something similar can be done in PS as well but the reason for the copy-move-repeat-merge layers is to control the length of the shadow. Just eyeballing and brushing it in can produce some shadows longer than others. Plus with PS you can turn the whole thing into an action that does it all for you with just a click. The other reason is that in PS we often use layer styles and if we put a black outer stroke on the house then the shadow comes out the size of the shape itself without factoring in the stroke, thus the shadow comes out smaller and doesn't line up properly. Lots of ways to do the same thing I guess so thanks for adding this info.
If the radiance of a thousand suns was to burst at once into the sky, that would be like the splendor of the Mighty One...I am become Death, the Shatterer of worlds.
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Cool. I like things that can automate repetitive stuff.
All my shadows would be the same length, though, I used one house in my example but in a real map I would do them all at once because I selected the whole buildings layer for the clipboard.
As an aside, clipboard to brush, pencil, airbrush is one of my favorite tools. A thousand different uses
Last edited by Boethius61; 12-14-2009 at 09:07 PM. Reason: typos and grammar
Maybe RobA and his Gimp wizardry can write a script for copy layer, move it down 1 pixel, move it over 1 pixel, repeat 9 times, merge layers and that would function the same way.
If the radiance of a thousand suns was to burst at once into the sky, that would be like the splendor of the Mighty One...I am become Death, the Shatterer of worlds.
-J. Robert Oppenheimer (father of the atom bomb) alluding to The Bhagavad Gita (Chapter 11, Verse 32)
My Maps ~ My Brushes ~ My Tutorials ~ My Challenge Maps
I usually use the motion blur that gimp provides. Threshold transparency (alpha channel) then gauss blur slightly:
The script in gimp would be trivial, however.
@Boethius61 Also, there is a limit in gimp that clipboard brushes are a max of 512x512, this only works when the area you want to work on is smaller than that.
-Rob A>
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