Kingdom of Gallend
I had been tossing around ideas for a campaign and figured it was time to make a map, hopefully to help get the ball rolling. I'm starting with a small area as my experience in any sort of graphical stuff (aside from stick figures in MS Paint) is nil. So I decided to go with GIMP and use RobA's tutorial as a starting point. The little pictures in this post will link to the bigger pictures, so don't forget to click.
After a little bit, I got the grass and dirt down.
Came back a little later and continued with my efforts. I threw in some forests, mountains, and a few rivers. I also wound up redoing the grass.
Didn't like the way the mountains turned out, so I followed RobA's other tutorial about mountains. Slight tweakage to the forests as well. I really like the way the color turned out in the bottom right forest, so I think I will go over the rest again.
Then I chugged forth. Didn't like the grass, so I toned it back down a little. Also added paths, labels, and another mountain landmark up top. [Note: Yes, I know South Fork is north of North Fork (well, it will be once I put my compass in) and it was done on purpose.]
And here we go, just about finished. Not sure what I did to the sea colors.
Criticisms or suggestions? Mountains too bright?
Last edited by strebalicious; 02-19-2009 at 10:22 AM.
The last one is defintely coming along nicely. In the first two your forest and mountains looked the same (other than color).
Keep plugging away, RobA's tutorial us a great place to start, once you've gotten the basic techniques down you'll be able to branch out and try other things until you find the "style" that you like.
My Finished Maps | My Challenge Maps | Still poking around occasionally...
Unless otherwise stated by me in the post, all work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 3.0 United States License.
I have been tooling around with GIMP. Stuff like using the blend tool to retouch the forest colors, or using an airbrush to soften the ridges or bumps on mountains and such. But man, GIMP sure likes to eat my computer's memory.Originally Posted by Steel General
gimp tip
Yeah. I just upgraded from 1 GB to 4 GB (and discovered that even though the BIOS sees 4GB, it will only allow the OS to use 3GB, supposedly because that addres space is taken up by drivers) and have noticed a big performance improvement.
The other ting is (if you have more memory installed) to increase the default tile caching settings, and (like with PS) set the swap drive to be different from your OS drive (if possible).
-Rob A>
My tutorials: Using GIMP to Create an Artistic Regional Map ~ All My Tutorials
My GIMP Scripts: Rotating Brush ~ Gradient from Image ~ Mosaic Tile Helper ~ Random Density Map ~ Subterranean Map Prettier ~ Tapered Stroke Path ~ Random Rotate Floating Layer ~ Batch Image to Pattern ~ Better Seamless Tiles ~ Tile Shuffle ~ Scale Pattern ~ Grid of Guides ~ Fractalize path ~ Label Points
My Maps: Finished Maps ~ Challenge Entries ~ My Portfolio: www.cartocopia.com
Yeah if I understand it correctly, 32bit windows XP or Vista will only recognize up to 3GB of memory. Need to upgrade to 64bit before you'll be able to use all 4GB.
My Finished Maps | My Challenge Maps | Still poking around occasionally...
Unless otherwise stated by me in the post, all work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 3.0 United States License.
Looks good so far. The South fork/North fork ordering reminds me of North and South Parade in Oxford - also the wrong way round naively. But South Parade was the southern edge of one army whereas North Parade was the northern edge of the other, so north parade had to be south of south parade.
As for the map, it's coming along nicely. I'd suggest toning down the overall shadows on the forests as they currently look like they are taller than the mountains. Otherwise, it's looking lovely.
Looks like a good start. Replacing the mountains definitely a good idea.
I do think that the rivers would look better if they resembled the cost more (more defined).
Also I like the way the roads fade. Pressure sensitivity FTW?
I'd dig up some old posts on Mountains if I had time to, but in this forum there's a discussion or two from a while back where different mountain-making techniques were discussed in GIMP. One of the threads in question was named "Playing with Mountains". IIRC, it has links to some of the other threads where mountain techniques were discussed.
Also... regarding the roads, I'd move them down in the layer stack below your town/city icons, so the town/cities are on top of the roads instead of the roads covering them.
...oh... Here's the links. My mountains at the time weren't fabulous, but they were moving in the right direction, I think...
Last edited by Karro; 02-18-2009 at 04:39 PM. Reason: Added link.
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Pimping my worldmap here. Still WIP... long way to go, but I'm pretty proud of what I've done so far...
Rob A: Yeah my laptop has Vista and 3GB of RAM on it. I'll try tweaking the caching and page files and all that. It's fine for maybe an hour or so, then it will just start taking longer and longer to do simple things like moving a selection or changing the blend mode. At that point I have to reboot the computer to get it running good again.
torstan: I blended the colors of the forest better. Taking that dark border off made it flow better.
Volsung: Not exactly sure how I did the road fade thing. I think when I stroked the path with the paintbrush, I had checked on the mimic brush dynamics (or whatever that check box is). I like how it turned out because it pretty closely mimics the areas I felt were going to be low traffic areas anyway.
Karro: I think I figured out the problem with my mountains. I think I put the detail and size up too high on the noise and also mis-tweak the levels later on. Off the top of my head, I think my city symbols and roads are on the same layer.
Other notes: Most of this stuff is pulled from my brain as I'm at work and can't check it. And I'm not entirely sure why Gallend's Torch grass area looks so much brighter than anything else. And I got to change the color for the region names. It looked greenish when I printed it instead of a yellow.
Sea lanes? Tried to do the same method as making roads, but they just kept turning out pink no matter what color I used. Not quite sure what I'm doing wrong.
And I will probably just cut the bottom area off a bit. I put a title in the upper left corner, but still trying to figure out how to get a compass rose in there.
The other thing to do is to check your undo cache size. Memory use grows like crazy if the undo buffer is too large. One thing I have done is to map the "clear undo history" command to a hotkey so I can quickly free up memory by dumping the undo history when it is convenient.
-Rob A>
My GIMP Scripts: Rotating Brush ~ Gradient from Image ~ Mosaic Tile Helper ~ Random Density Map ~ Subterranean Map Prettier ~ Tapered Stroke Path ~ Random Rotate Floating Layer ~ Batch Image to Pattern ~ Better Seamless Tiles ~ Tile Shuffle ~ Scale Pattern ~ Grid of Guides ~ Fractalize path ~ Label Points
My Maps: Finished Maps ~ Challenge Entries ~ My Portfolio: www.cartocopia.com
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