[Award Winner] Yet Another Mountain Tutorial Using GIMP

[RobA]

That looks nice! Mind if I link to this post from my big 'ARM' tut?

Also a couple of tips that might help, play with them an include them if you wish...

1) with the magic want (fuzzy select) tool in gimp, click and hold the mouse button down. moving the mouse up or down will change the threshold slider and the screen will update to show you the selection! (I only found this out last week, and it is really handy. It also works with the select by colour tool)

2) another option to the mathmap noise filter is the felimage noise plugin which is what I use to avoid the artifacts the built in noise filter has. It also makes a nice forest bumpmap, btw.

3) I recently discovered a good way to draw uniform mountain ranges. instead of what you made (the big white bugs), draw the ridge lines in white using the 3 pixel hard brush, then use the Filters->Generic->Dialate to grow the white area, and crtl-F to get it 1/2 the size you want your mountain, then blur by the 2x the same amount:


In any case, great addition to the tutorials here!

-Rob A>

P.S. I added a few tags to your post.

[kjdavies]

That looks nice! Mind if I link to this post from my big 'ARM' tut?

Absolutely not, go ahead. I'd intended to link to the ARM, but at 2:00AM, after six hours working on this with a cold and a headache, I just wanted to go to bed.

(It didn't work; after a couple of hours of not-sleeping I got up again, but didn't want to risk anything dumb happening so I didn't touch this.)

Also a couple of tips that might help, play with them an include them if you wish...

I'd like to review the GIMP tutorial that's here (noticed it last night) and see if it's there, first. I can see putting together a book of common tasks and tricks in GIMP; I found myself wanted to just say 'add a black layer above the $foo layer', but completeness made me do it the long way.

1) with the magic want (fuzzy select) tool in gimp, click and hold the mouse button down. moving the mouse up or down will change the threshold slider and the screen will update to show you the selection! (I only found this out last week, and it is really handy. It also works with the select by colour tool)

I learned about this one recently myself (bought a couple of books on GIMP, haven't finished reading them yet). As I recall it doesn't work with GIMP 2.4 and I didn't want to complicate things any more than needed.

2) another option to the mathmap noise filter is the felimage noise plugin which is what I use to avoid the artifacts the built in noise filter has. It also makes a nice forest bumpmap, btw.

So I see (I've read the forest tutorial).

What I'd really like to see is a simple and usable GIMP plugin for libnoise. MathMap purports to include libnoise, but I find MathMap's documentation rather weak -- I had to ask in #gimp how to find out where to find the MathMap plugin after it was installed!

3) I recently discovered a good way to draw uniform mountain ranges. instead of what you made (the big white bugs), draw the ridge lines in white using the 3 pixel hard brush, then use the Filters->Generic->Dialate to grow the white area, and crtl-F to get it 1/2 the size you want your mountain, then blur by the 2x the same amount:

Interesting approach. Often when I do mountains I just scribble a few lines close together (say, 25-40 pixels across) and score some shorter lines across them, then go from there. This looks like it may give a little finer control over it. I'll give it a try.

In any case, great addition to the tutorials here!

Thanks! I can't say it was fun to write (*click click click click* *three or more screenshots* gets old, fast), but I'm moderately proud of it. Except for the typos I now see.

P.S. I added a few tags to your post.

Ah, good. I didn't think to tag it before I posted, then couldn't see how to add them later.

Keith