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Thread: Subcontinent: The Westerlands in Gimp

  1. #1
    Guild Apprentice geoff_nunn's Avatar
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    Wip Subcontinent: The Westerlands in Gimp

    Hey, I'd slipped back into lurker status for quite a while, but Arsheesh recently tipped me off to Gidde's Gimp adaptation of Ascension's atlas tutorial, so I thought I'd take a crack at the technique in hopes of finally creating a satisfying map for my current D&D campaign. This is what I have so far...

    A couple things I would love some advice on... I am not very happy with the way the mountains merge into the lowlands. I had to use the lasso tool to move all my mountains into place by hand, since the technique in the tut places them randomly... as a result, I just noticed a big-ol' vertical edge in the costal mountains, and many of the other ranges seem misty rather than blended where they meet the lowlands... if that makes any sense.

    I made sure to throw some rep to Ascension, Gidde and Arsheesh for the tutorials and the heads-up that they existed, respectively.
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    Last edited by geoff_nunn; 03-03-2010 at 12:02 PM. Reason: spelling errors

  2. #2

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    Hey Geoff,

    Wow, you sure didn't waist any time! Actually, mist and vertical edge notwithstanding, I think you've done a pretty good job on those mountain ranges, given that you're working with random cloud patterns. I'm not quite sure exactly how that vertical line in the south-west mountain ranges showed up. My only guess might be that perhaps in attempting to move all of the mountain ranges, you might have accidentally moved one of the layers as well? As for the off-set snow caps, I experienced the same issue in making my map. What I did was simply to use the eraser, smudge and blur tool on the snow-caps layer to try and manually get the snow caps in the right places. If I were to do the map over again, I would do things differently. Instead of waiting till step 20 to erase/move the already finished mountains, in-between step 15a. and 15b. I would have moved the resultant cloud patterns where I wanted my mountain ranges to be. If I had done this I would have saved myself a considerable amount of time doing "touch up" detail, since steps 16-19 of mountain creation would have be based on the "planned" mountain arrangement, not the "random" cloud generation. So, if you still have an existing duplicate layer of the mountain layer prior to step 15, this might be another option available to you.

    Over all this is looking great so far though Geoff. Looking forward to watching it progress. By the way, if you're looking for ideas for how to do trees, a friend and I are currently collaborating on a tutorial on the subject. We haven't finalized the tutorial yet, but I could send you the beta-test tut if you'd like. If you're interested, just email me at arsheesh@yahoo.com.

    Cheers,

    -Arsheesh

  3. #3

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    Oh, and just one more thing: it seems that the mountain ranges are hovering over a few of your lakes. You might want to use coastline channel to selection, and, following step 15b-h, delete the mountains floating over those lakes.

  4. #4
    Guild Apprentice geoff_nunn's Avatar
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    Yeah... I noticed that too. The hovering effect only happened when I physically moved the mountains into position with the lasso, which happened after the channel to selection steps. I'll probably take a second crack at things using your suggestion of editing the cloud layer before generating the mountains/hills. I think I may try a hybrid technique between the one in Ascension's tutorial and the one in Rob A's Artistic regional map tut.

  5. #5
    Guild Apprentice geoff_nunn's Avatar
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    Wip Trying Again

    Okay, after quite awhile away, I have decided to have another go at this regional map. It's currently still a WIP. I started over with the mountains using Gidde's adaptation of Ascension's atlas tutorial. I played with brushing the clouds used to make the mountains in order to make them appear where I wanted, and I feel the result looks much better than my previous attempt. I then applied Arsheesh's technique for generating forests. While I think it turned out okay, the smooth, sudden edges of some of the forests kind of bug me. I may need to tweak this somehow.

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  6. #6

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    Gnunn!

    Good to see you back at the Guild again. Sorry, I missed your earlier post till today. As to the forests technique, I've made some additions and revisions to the technique since I originally posted that tut (someday I'm going to have to rewrite the Tutorial altogether). If you read through the posts on the tutorial thread (which you can find a link to in my sig) you'll find some suggestions I make for helping to get rid of those annoying hard edges. Also, just today I added an update on how to make these forests more lifelike by mixing up the colors a bit. If you have any questions, or run into any issues with any of the updated info let me know. Looking forward to watching your map take shape.

    EDIT: Oh, also try setting the Layer Mode of the Green Tree Color layer to "Multiply" rather than "Soft Light".

    Cheers,
    -Arsheesh
    Last edited by arsheesh; 02-24-2011 at 07:20 PM.

  7. #7
    Guild Apprentice geoff_nunn's Avatar
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    Wip

    Okay, I decided to wait to do a final rendering of the forests until after I had a chance to put my rivers in place. I added the rivers using the Gidde/Ascension tutorial method, with my mouse pen's sensitivity turned on to give them a taper. I also added a layer called "river cut" with an emboss effect to give the rivers some discernible banks. Finally, I had some lakes that appeared when I rendered the oceans, but I needed to add others as well. I drew the new lakes in the river layer, abd then added some coloration over the tops of the other lakes to help them blend better with the rivers.

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  8. #8
    Guild Apprentice geoff_nunn's Avatar
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    Wip

    Okay, here I have added the forests back using Arsheesh's trees brush to break up the edges. I also found that after painting in the forest edges, it helps make a more organic shadow to alpha to selection, switch to the forest drop shadow layer and then apply the forest edge as a mask.

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    Not too shabby.
    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

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