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The Cartographers’ Guild is a forum created by and for map makers and aficionados, a place where every aspect of cartography can be admired, examined, learned, and discussed. Our membership consists of professional designers and artists, hobbyists, and amateurs—all are welcome to join and participate in the quest for cartographic skill and knowledge.
Although we specialize in maps of fictional realms, as commonly used in both novels and games (both tabletop and role-playing), many Guild members are also proficient in historical and contemporary maps. Likewise, we specialize in computer-assisted cartography (such as with GIMP, Adobe apps, Campaign Cartographer, Dundjinni, etc.), although many members here also have interest in maps drafted by hand.
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I got to the end of Pt. 2 of RobA's tutorial, "Using GIMP to Create an Artistic Regional RPG Map" but I wasn't happy with how the mountains looked. I found another tutorial by RobA, "Simple Mountains in GIMP" and decided to use that technique instead. Here is my first pass at the alternate technique: I thought the mountains turned out pretty good, though there was a strange inverted ridge around the mountains that I ...
Well, I finished Pt. 2 of RobA's tutorial. I didn't quite like the mountains I got the first time, so I re-did the mountains and then went through the rest of the tutorial. I'm still not quite satisfied with it somehow, but overall I think the result is quite impressive. Especially compared to the original hand-drawn map. Here's the results so far:
So I don't know why the mountain technique wasn't working last time, but I deleted the "mountain" layers from the image and decided to start over. This time, I did a "save as" and created a whole new file to do trial-and-error on. For some reason, this time it worked pretty well: I don't really like the placement of the mountains, though. Now that I know how the technique is supposed to work (I think), I can go back and change it. ...
In addition to learning Fractal Mapper, I'm also trying to learn techniques for map-making in GIMP. Right now, I'm working through two different tutorials: one by Butch Curry (which uses Photoshop, so I'm adapting it to Gimp as I go), and one by RobA here in Cartographers' Guild. I haven't gotten very far with Curry's method, but here is a shot of what I have. I created a forest pattern, and put it on a mask layer, so that I can very quickly paint in areas of forest on my map. ...
I am attempting to learn how to use Fractal Mapper. I like the Fractal World Explorer, and supposedly you can import and export images between FWE and Fractal Mapper. In v7 however (the one I have), the interface is clunky and the results are often not the best. Still, I've been making some amount of progress by using a hand-drawn map as a background image, and building on top of that. I'm starting with a continent map and a small regional map that I had drawn by hand. In this post ...
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