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Welcome!
There's nothing screaming "wrong" to me. Nice start.
Forests test
Hi, Cartographers' Guild, I'm Non Serviam. I suppose I'm an ex-lurker.
I've been experimenting with Gidde's GIMP version of Ascension's Atlas-style tutorial. I'm trying to adapt the procedure so that instead of producing whole hemispheres it produces continental maps on the scale of, say, northwestern Europe. I also wanted forests, which Gidde's tutorial doesn't produce.
Here's a sample output. Do the forests look ok? Anything else glaringly wrong?
Welcome!
There's nothing screaming "wrong" to me. Nice start.
Here's another version with the technique refined a bit.
The mountains, plains, and forests look great! The rivers look a little odd, taking on the texture of the forest beneath. Are the forests a layer produced after the mountains/plains textures are made? If so, maybe you could make them, draw rivers on a separate layer above that, turn off the rivers, generate the forests, then put the rivers- smooth-looking- atop that. If you scatter-erased some of the watercourses where they run through the woods, it might ‘pull them’ visually ‘under’ the canopy.
Nothing’s going to pull them down to ground level when they texturally lie on top of the trees though :-).
Were the rivers made at the same resolution as the landforms? I often draw with a pencil brush, no aliasing, and I get those jaggies. I bet if you either put some blur on the river layer or if you drew them with a blurred ‘paintbrush’ dot, they’d blend. It’s a tough trade off - rivers *do* after all have mostly sharp banks when you zoom all the way to photo-reality <shrug> ... the trade offs we accept to gen maps at less than full print resolution, eh? I love atlas map styles (National Geographic, A-Z, Goode, Kunth-Verlag...) but I will *never* own enough graphics power to duplicate their crispness, digitally.
Your mod of Gidde’s version of Ascenscion’s methods looks to be really good - you’ll have to show us how when you get it like you like it!
Yes, the forests are a separate layer produced after the hills and mountains. I like the forest colours but I think they're still too tall/cast too much shadow, and I'd like to refine that some more.
You're right about the rivers: I hadn't given them a lot of thought. I'd just scribbled them onto a separate layer using the ink tool at size 1. Now you point it out, I do think they could use some blending.
In the fullness of time I would like to produce a proper .pdf tutorial that a complete newbie to GIMP could follow -- that's really the least I can do, to pay forward the knowledge I've gained here. At the moment all I have is a rough set of notes outlining the procedure. I think an intermediate GIMP user could probably follow those, though, and I'm happy to post them if you think it would help?
Further refinement of the trees.
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