Current project in GIMP

[RobA]

I believe the comment on antialiasing is directed to the rivers and coastlines (and contour lines) They display the "jaggies". How did you draw them?

If freehand, use the paintbrush tool rather than the pencil tool. This will give smoother lines. Alternately, create them as paths (either in GIMP directly or in Inkscape then imported into GIMP) then stroke the paths.

For the contour lines, again, I don't know how you created them... stroked selections should not look as jagged as your do.

Overall, however, nice work, with a decent colour palette choice. I, too like the B/W map, but there are two issues I see - no roads/trails are clearly shown, and the river seem to get lost in the Fell Grave.

-Rob A>

[ravells]

I'm going to pinch that anti-aliasing tutorial and pop it onto the tutorials section - very useful! And I love the way your map is coming on Faide, nothing to add to what the others have said (which I'm sure will keep you pretty busy)!

Ravs

[Faide]

Originally, every line was drawn by mouse with pencil line. Which is why it had the "jaggies". (which I never noticed until it was pointed out)

I've redone the layers by dint of much stroking and the lines are definitely smoother now.

But, is it just me, or does it all look somehow more cartoony?

Perhaps I now need to fade the colours down a bit?

Thanks for all the feedback. It's set me thinking about the different kind of maps you need as a DM and want as a player handout.

Possibly more art, less function for a players map? I dunno.

Karl

[ravells]

It's been a while since I've seen that contour style used. In fact I think this is the first time I've seen it used on these boards. It gives the maps a really detailed feel. If the map looks cartoony, it's only because of the black outlines and the colour fills.
Try this:
1. Make the strokes of the contour lines thinner and play with shades of grey rather than black. (Although black works for me with this map).
2. Do a search on 'Hypsometric colour (or color) - for those of use who don't use the superflous 'u' (or should that be a superfos 'u'? ), it should bring up a couple of threads on colour choices for this style of map. Generally to show height you want the higher altitudes to fade to white and the lower altitutudes to be a deep green. BUT (and here's the problem) If you have say, desert, at low altitudes, using a green suggests vegetation, so you need to make some compromises there. Looking at the colours of atlases should help here.

[Midgardsormr]

Actually, it's superfluous. Two u's.

I really liked the second map, too (the greyscale one (or should that be grayscale?)). My response to your players would be: You want a different style? You're welcome to make it, and maybe I'll give your character a cool bonus as a reward.

These maps are the product of only a couple of weeks' worth of learning GIMP? Do you have prior experience with other paint programs?

[RobA]

Wow - thats much smoother!

And thanks for stating that this was done with only a couple weeks playing with GIMP. One think I always hear is "GIMP is too hard to use"...but I think you demonstrate well what a GIMP "newbie" can accomplish...

One suggestion to make it less cartoonish...(and getting into intermediate GIMP now Bump mapping...

1) Isolate a copy of all the rivers as a new layer, white on black.
2) apply a small (3 px) blur
3) Adjust the levels to the colour goes from black to 25% (dark grey)
3) Isolate a copy of your greyscale contour map (black=water, white = peaks)
4) Blur this layer so so the contour lines are gone.
5) Adjust the levels to the colour goes from to black to 75% (light grey)
6) set one of the two to addition, and merge them together. This will give you a heightfield corresponding to the contour, with the river beds "pillow embossed" into it.
7) Apply a bump map to the main image, using this heightfield.

This is the same technique I used on my Niagara contest map.

-Rob A>

[Faide]

I've actually found GIMP to be very instinctive to use.
The first thing I did after downloading it was to run through this tutorial;

http://www.santharia.com/workshop/maps_1.htm

Which produced the black and white map. After that it was just picking through the various tutorials I found on this site and modifying some I found on Youtube for Photoshop.

I think my players expected scale models because I've made them for them before. I made a simple foam model of an underground dwarven city so they could figure out where everything was (Before it got sucked into a volcano) and I've made a few terrain pieces where I couldn't get a battle map to show the three dimensional elements clearly.

I've done plenty of hand drawn maps in the past for my games but I've never done any computerised ones before and haven't touched a paint programme since school.

I'll have to see if I can find the magic words to get my scanner to work again and I'll upload some of my other maps.

Karl

[Faide]

Hi Rob

I tried what you suggested but just ended up with a dark blurry mess.

1) I took a copy of the rivers white on black no problems with a little gaussian blur.
3) When you say adjust the levels of colour do you mean slide the arrow to roughly 25% from the left or is there a way of reading an exact number?
3?) Isolating a copy of grey scale contour map...Hmm that was pretty tricky. I copied and coloured each of the successive layers evenly from black to white using the value number on the FG/BG dialog box
4) I gave a 6 pixel gaussian blur
5) adjusted the colour levels to roughly 75%
6) Set the top layer to addition and then merged them
7) And then eventually found a bump map command but it didn't seem to do anything.

I ended up with this curiosity

What did I do wrong? I'm guessing at the contour shading stage.

Karl

[RobA]

Oops. I messed up the river. They should have been black on white...

Here are some grabs of a quick (and messy) test to show you...

If I get the order right, they are
- the "flat" map
- the greyscale heightfield, with the rivers merged on the terrain.
- the bumpmap dialog. Select the flat layer (or a copy), then run the filter. You have to pick the heightfield layer as the bumpmap (or it defaults to the selected layer)
- the bumpmap applied to the flat map.

Hope that is clearer... Also blur your countour heightfield to get rid of the steps changes in colour, or they will show up as distinct flat bands in the bump mapping process...

-Rob A>

[Faide]

Thanks for clarifying that Rob.

That's a phenomenal effect, I'm quite amazed.
I've got loads of ideas of how to use that.

In my experiments I found it hard to make the rivers consistently deep over different contour levels, rather than carving a deeper channel in the higher levels. Using the soft glow mode on the river before adding it on top of the height chart seems to calm it down a bit and make it work better.

I'll post my experiments later.