[Award Winner] Using GIMP to Create an Artistic Regional RPG Map

[nijineko]

i'm reinstalling gimp just to try this and the old paper tutorial out. =D thank you very much!

[Dayzie]

Hey, this is brilliant. Being the insomniac that I am, I've been playing with this all night. I've never touched anything outside of paint, seeing as I have no artistic ability whatsoever, but this was very easy to follow. I've just hit the mountains and have run out of steam for now - but wanted to let you know that from a total newbie's perspective, this is a very well written tutorial.

E

[ggdancer]

this is such a cool tutorial. I've been using Gimp for ages and this is one of the best tuts I've seen. It has inspired me to restart a project i started about 10 years ago. maybe i'll finish it now

[RobA]

Thanks ggdancer!

Hope you share your results.

-Rob A>

[Skycast]

This thread has inspired me to download GIMP and give it a try to make a map in this style. However I didn't get very far before hitting a bump in the road. Using the PDF as a reference, here's where I'm at:

Part 1, Page 8 - Created the "Land Noise" layer with clouds and changed the blend mode to overlay (I think I did that part right, but I'm not sure).

Part 1, Page 8,9 - Created the "Land Clip" layer and filled it with white using the bucket tool. Opened up COLORS > LEVELS and started changing the white output slider and nothing happened.

Obviously I've missed something here and being utterly new to GIMP it's not surprising. One question, when adding a new layer, what should the layer fill type be: foreground color, background color, white, or transparency? The only layer creation step that stipulated that part was the initial "Land" layer and it said transparency so I've created all my layers since there with that same type.

Thanks in advance...I'm eager to keep moving along with this experiement.

[Xeviat]

It's possible you're playing with the wrong slider in the Levels. There's two bars, one for input and one for output. Check if you're fiddling with output. Oh, and that white layer should be set to "lighten" for its blend mode. That looks like the step you missed.

[Skycast]

It's possible you're playing with the wrong slider in the Levels. There's two bars, one for input and one for output. Check if you're fiddling with output. Oh, and that white layer should be set to "lighten" for its blend mode. That looks like the step you missed.

I'm using the correct output slider, but I did miss changing the blend mode to lighten. I went back and did that with still no success. All I get is the layer going from white to gray to black when I adjust the slider, nothing underneath shows up.

[jfrazierjr]

This thread has inspired me to download GIMP and give it a try to make a map in this style. However I didn't get very far before hitting a bump in the road. Using the PDF as a reference, here's where I'm at:

Part 1, Page 8 - Created the "Land Noise" layer with clouds and changed the blend mode to overlay (I think I did that part right, but I'm not sure).

Part 1, Page 8,9 - Created the "Land Clip" layer and filled it with white using the bucket tool. Opened up COLORS > LEVELS and started changing the white output slider and nothing happened.

Obviously I've missed something here and being utterly new to GIMP it's not surprising. One question, when adding a new layer, what should the layer fill type be: foreground color, background color, white, or transparency? The only layer creation step that stipulated that part was the initial "Land" layer and it said transparency so I've created all my layers since there with that same type.

Thanks in advance...I'm eager to keep moving along with this experiement.

Bottom Layer: Black with white where the land should be, and then blurred
Layer 2 (Noise): color does not matter since this is the noise layer. Mode should be overlay
Layer 3 (Clip): White layer with mode set to lighten only.

After your third layer, you then use the levels dialog to remove the solid white and it turns "grey" to black as you slide the output from right to left (whiter to darker). As the white goes down, it will reveal the "clouds" underneath on the grey/black background.

Hope that helps. Goodness knows, I have gotten a lot of practice with this since I got GIMP and this Tut. last week.

Joe

[RobA]

Thanks Joe - that said it better than I could have

-Rob A>

[DanChops]

RobA - Thanks for superb tutorial. I stumbled across the guild here a few months ago and have been itching to do this sort of map work, but have been at a complete loss as to how to start. This tutorial was exactly what I was looknig for. A very sincere thank you.

Here is my attempt so far at putting this tutorial in practice. This is my first go with GIMP (indeed, with any image editing software) so it took a bit of doing to get to this point. (i should note that this map is just a doodle - it's not intended to be realistic or usable at all.) By and large I'm quite please with where I've gotten so far, although I do have a number of problems.

The most glaring issue to me is that my mountains are simply too orange. I'm not really sure how to address that. I tried playing with the levels, but to no avail.

Another issue is that the edge of the forests seems too sharp. Perhaps I should do a larger gaussian blur on the "Forest Color" layer mask? (I think that's what it's called anyway - the cookie cutter template that limits the contents of the Forest Color layer to a certain area of the map.) That may work, I'll have to try it out tomorrow.

A final issue is that I'm not happy with the desert transistion in the north-east of the map. I suppose I could create a third layer with colors that would transition between the desert and grass layers - a "Sahel" layer as it were. Is there a better way to deal with this transition?

Anyway, thanks again for the tutorial!