[Award Winner] Eriond - A Tutorial for GIMP & Wilbur

[zukeprime]

Really awesome tutorial Arsheesh...though I have to admit I was pulling my hair out with Wilbur, mostly trying to get rivers where I want them. Just wanted to show what I was able to do. First, I started with a CC3 map I made for some folks on G+ just for kicks. I wanted to replicate this map, but give it a more realistic feel.
Taming of the Eastlands 500x400 COLOR.JPG
Obviously, you can tell its a CC3 map a mile away.

Using your tutorial, this was what I was able to do:
TOEL2.jpg

I'm really impressed with the results. Obviously, I'm still not done. For example, I'm going to have to manually add some rivers in the dark "blob-ish" swamp area in the south. The trouble I was having with Wilbur is that it wasn't making good rivers...it kept making these terribly short "wisps". My solution was to go back to Gimp and tone down the Land Clouds layer (reducing contrast) and doing a little more sculpting on the areas I wanted to force rivers. The only place it really didn't work was in the south swamp area, and the southeast peninsula where you can see a bit of a rut moving nw to se. Also, I probably should have spent more time beefing up my mountains, they look a little sparse and thin.

Anyway, I wanted to personally thank you for taking the time to make such an incredibly detailed tutorial. Any chance we can get your techniques on labeling? LOL, that's my next step.

[arsheesh]

Really awesome tutorial Arsheesh...though I have to admit I was pulling my hair out with Wilbur, mostly trying to get rivers where I want them... The trouble I was having with Wilbur is that it wasn't making good rivers...it kept making these terribly short "wisps". My solution was to go back to Gimp and tone down the Land Clouds layer (reducing contrast) and doing a little more sculpting on the areas I wanted to force rivers. The only place it really didn't work was in the south swamp area, and the southeast peninsula where you can see a bit of a rut moving nw to se.

Anyway, I wanted to personally thank you for taking the time to make such an incredibly detailed tutorial. Any chance we can get your techniques on labeling? LOL, that's my next step.

Yeah getting rivers to correspond to a previously existing map is one of the trickiest things to do when using Wilbur. The method you described is pretty much how I handle it, but it can be very time consuming. I'm really glad that the tutorial was helpful to you, your results turned out very nicely (great work!). As to labels, it seems to me that someone here once wrote up a walk-through on this, but darned if I can find it. However I think RobA has in in one or two of his tutorials discussed how to place text on a path (to make curved text) in GIMP and in Inkscape. I've thought about creating a sort of basic 101 level "how to" that describes things such as this and how to create icons and such. However sadly my plate is full at the moment and I don't think I'll be able to do pursue this for some time.

Cheers,
-Arsheesh