[Award Winner] Tapered Rivers in GIMP

[mramshaw]

RobA, I learned of you over at MeetTheGimp.org and I'm very happy I registered here
as I can now download some of your great GIMP scripts. This one looks like another
winner! Thanks.

[Insufficient Metal]

Just wanted to say thank you for the great tutorial. I was struggling with my rivers in Inkscape, just making crappy freehand lines, until I found this tutorial. Now I'm much happier with how they turned out:

http://cdn.obsidianportal.com/map_im...exmap_aged.jpg

Still a work in progress, but an order of magnitude nicer than what I had! Thanks so much!

[akaddk]

I've tried this a dozen different ways a dozen times each and yet can't replicate your results. Using the 'default' settings with a path that only has two nodes, I'm constantly getting 'splotches' where the tapering sort-of resets slightly. The effect ends up making it look like several tapered lines joined together. I have no idea what I'm doing wrong

[Evocati]

I'm not having any luck in getting this to work. I drew my line with my pencil, used fuzzy select to pick the river(s), switched to brush then ran the script (values: 1, 3, 20, .5) and the line didn't do anything. Any suggestions?

[johnvanvliet]

Hi Evocati
you do know that the script-foo script in the first post is 7 years old and out of date
and is for a ANTIQUE version of the Gimp that is and has not been supported in well 7 YEARS

think of it this way

you have a brand new 64 bit windows 10 install

this is a 32 bit windows XP program

-- will not work out well

in 2008 the version of gimp was 2.1

now in 2015 it is 2.8.14 and will soon be Gimp 3.0
back a few YEARS the gimp 2.4 code was tossed in the trash and rewrote into 2.6 and 2.8 to become the soon to be released Gimp 3.0

code for gimp 2.1 will NOT work in the current Gimp 2.8.14

also the GUI and the tool options are also now rather DIFFERENT than back in 2008 and gimp 2.1

but it sort of works
use the path tool to set a path then "select path "
but it is NOT a taper

the NEWER ( was not in gimp 2.1 ) ink well pen tool will taper a line as you draw

[Evocati]

That analogy doesn't work, but I get it; coding for gimp has changed significantly enough that this script no longer functions.

I'll give the ink pen a shot. Frankly, it sounds like I need to get a Syntec or something :-/ Thanks for the fast response, as well. I was kinda wondering if anyone was going to say anything since the thread was kinda old.

Thank you :-)
~Evo.

[HBrown]

Hi Evocati
you do know that the script-foo script in the first post is 7 years old and out of date
and is for a ANTIQUE version of the Gimp that is and has not been supported in well 7 YEARS

I use this script in 2.8.14. I think if you cannot use it, something else is wrong.

[StillnessTolls]

Hey RobA, I'm a little confused about using the script. In your tut you say to use the pen tool, do you mean the pathing tool? I don't think I'm using it properly because my path doesn't do anything after I switch to the paintbrush tool. (I just started using gimp today so it's been a little confusing)

Edit: Ah I just read through the last page, sad to see this doesn't work so well anymore. I'll try to figure out the ink tool, hopefully it will create a similar tapering effect.

[RobA]

Hey RobA, I'm a little confused about using the script. In your tut you say to use the pen tool, do you mean the pathing tool? I don't think I'm using it properly because my path doesn't do anything after I switch to the paintbrush tool. (I just started using gimp today so it's been a little confusing)

Edit: Ah I just read through the last page, sad to see this doesn't work so well anymore. I'll try to figure out the ink tool, hopefully it will create a similar tapering effect.

As a followup- I do all my rivers with a pressure sensitive tablet using size dynamics and smoothing with the gimp ink tool. If I only had a mouse, I would use Inkscape with path effects to get a tapered stroke.

-Rob A.