Thread: GIMP(and PS) questions on speeding up map creation - especially hand drawn

I don't' have a tablet yet so can't help you there. I probably do a lot of stuff the hard way just because I am coming from an old school background and am fairly new to digital painting.

Here is a screenshot of how I have mine set up. (the image is just a little experiment I was working on for a new style of mountains)

I also added on: http://code.google.com/p/gps-gimp-paint-studio/

I have created a folder of brushes I have created for different things as well.

That's about it, I don't think I have any speed tricks.

Wow Jax... Diggity the mountains.... Looking forward to seeing it more!!!

I do a different color palette for every map (except for commissions based on previous work). The only patterns I use regularly are stones or blocks for doing castle and wall parts and cracks patterns that I will overlay onto mountains or rocks. I tried using patterns a lot but I found it repetitive and dull so instead I rely on a combination of filters to get different effects since I like to experiment. Plus, relying on patterns make you a pattern hound and you can spend years wandering around the internet collecting patterns that you'll never use - I had thousands of them just sitting around collecting dust sort of like my font addiction - 25,000+ and I've only ever used about 10% of them. On the other hand, patterns can be of great use for a small-focus map such as a street full of roof tops or a bunch of hardwood floors for an inn. That's all just a matter of preference and scale. As for setting up a tablet, well, I have an Intuos 1 so I don't have all of those shortcuts to play with...I use the tablet to draw and the mouse for clicking things. Heck, I don't even use keyboard shortcuts very much since I only remember 4 or 5. I use old tools and old methods (when not experimenting) and every time I do something different. If I were more concerned about speed and efficiency or if I were hired by some big game company to make maps the same all of the time I'd get more into using such things but since I have a lot of time it doesn't bother me too much. The only things I really use consistently are brushes - small soft rounds (1-9 pixels) and small hard rounds (1-9 pixels) for line work (occasionally square tips and angle tips for calligraphic lines but I can use the tablet's pressure sensitivity with a round tip to get the same effect), and airbrushes (17-300 pixels) for shading. So my hand-drawn methods are fairly primitive and basic but that's all I've ever needed. My satellite and atlas styles rely on preset filter settings but I'm always twiddling the knobs a little bit for experimental purposes and I don't think I've ever used the same layer styles twice either.

Originally Posted by jfrazierjr

Wow Jax... Diggity the mountains.... Looking forward to seeing it more!!!

I'm not satisfied with how they turned out. If I shrink them way down they look great but I don't want to paint so large in order for them to look right. I'll have to take another stab at them but thanks