Using GIMP to simulate tectonic plates movements

[Warlin]

Stage 0 : AIMS AND GOALS, REFERENCES, MATERIAL AND TOOLS.
First of all, thanks to all the many cartographers' guilders that have developped tutorials for tectonics :
- The world of tutoralia - tectonics plates, climate by Woekan,
- Using Gplates 1.4 to study plate movement by Pixie,
or have shown the way to other :
- [WIP] World of Aduhr by Charerg
- AERLAAN by PaGaN,
- Unexplored Lands by Kacey,
for the more recents' one (oct 2017).

This tutorial aims to help cartographers to modelize throught the ages some tectonic movements with a small script-fu applet developped early in the 2017 year.

For that you need some material :
- seven relative eulerian pole grids in png format,
- two script-fu documents which you have to implement to GIMP (don't forget to move the txt extension to scm) : https://docs.gimp.org/en/install-script-fu.html
a workplace like this :
- 1800x900 px image size,
- ocean layer (filled with grey), continent mass layer (transparent + green mass), limit lines layer (transparent + red, green and violet lines).
Capture du 2017-10-13 12-19-39.png
and to know (or learn) some gimp techniques :
- offset and flip tool : layer->transform->offset, wrap around edge behavior and flip button.
- Selection from alpha and selection tool : layer->transparency->alpĥa to selection, and the intersection mode of the magic wand and lasso.

Table of content :
stage 1 : Basics, Eulerian pole and plate rotation,
stage 2 : Basics, Relative movement and plate limits,
stage 3 : Hard stuff, Fixing plates velocity,
stage 4 : Hard stuff, Mastering the Wham! effect,
stage 5 : Cool stuff, Implementing water level and erosion factors.

See you soon !