Eino, My First Map

[tilt]

well, you can work with bump maps in photoshop - but I find it a little ... eh... not difficult but time consuming. I guess I've gotta test GIMP one of these days

[nai888]

Since you're using gimp, it's not as bad as all that. Just grab (or make) a brush pipe. It randomly picks one of its set of symbols every time you click. For example, I've got a few tree pipe sets posted in the mapping elements section. Just download them, drop them into your gimp brush directory, and with some clever spacing setup, you can just paint in your forests in no time.

I've never even heard of that. It was exactly what I was looking for, and it turns out I could have had it! Argh! I'll have to look into that. The other thing I was contemplating was somehow making a tileable pattern of trees and just putting those down, meaning I could go in larger clumps than just single trees at a time. I suppose that would be noticeably repetitive, though, and I don't know how to do that, either.

It's one of two major advantages to using Gimp, in my humble opinion. The second being the bump map.

With the third major advantage being that it's completely free.