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

[arsheesh]

Also, I just had a thought. Have you ever created a new layer, and selected more or less the same color as the color you'd like the edges to be, then painted around the edges and hit the layer with a Gaussian Blur?


EDIT
I just experimented airbrushing the mountain layer to the point where the edge was just visible, then going over it with a soft eraser at 20% opacity. That'll work out pretty well for fixing those areas I accidentally took a hard eraser to earlier I think.

Yup, that will work too. However like I mentioned in my above comment to Durakken one downside of painting on a layer above the land clouds is that this may somewhat obscure the texture of the bottom layer. I've found that airbrushing the land clouds layer directly tends to better preserve this texture (but this is just a personal taste).

[ludgarthewarwolf]

Just wanted to post the latest map I made with this tutorial. It was made for a short lived project on reddit called conglerma. Unfortunately it seems to have since died, but I thought the map should see the light of day outside of the project so here it is:
WfCJRDY.jpg

[arsheesh]

Cool land shapes! I like how you did the mountains. Great job on this.

Cheers,
-Arsheesh

[Coriolis]

Hi Neptondoodle, great question. So in practice what I typically do is slightly erase the edges of the mountains cloud layer (a good trick to save time here is to use the select by color tool to select the transparent area of the area surrounding the mountains, grow the selection slightly - 5-20 px depending on the size of your map - then feather the selection by about the same amount and click delete) so that we can get rid of the hard edges, then gradually add layers of paint to the land clouds layer until the values of the two layers blend seamlessly together.



Thanks for your reply Durakken. I have tried the method you describe with some success. However one downside is that when painting on the mountains cloud layer one may partially obscure the cloud texture of the land clouds layer below. On the other hand, by painting on the land clouds layer directly I've found that the values and textures of the clouds are better preserved (see my above comment for details of my method). However both methods work.

Cheers,
-Arsheesh

I do a variation on Arsheesh's technique here. I like to use the smudge tool to blend the mountains into the surrounding terrain. This allows the mountains to have descending ridges. It also gives me a method for sculpting the mountains themselves. I still airbrush the land beneath it as well.

[johnvanvliet]

as of Gimp 2.8 there was added a "heal" tool
no need to try to blend something using the smudge tool

[Coriolis]

Interesting; I haven't played with that yet. I'll give it a try. Thanks!

[johnvanvliet]

you will need to read the instructions for the gimp heal tool

the percent of the transparency controls how much of the selected area VS the inferred is used
i normally use a 25% hard brush with 10% to 15% transparency

[Scarge]

So I found this tutorial after stumbling on your maps over at DA, and went ahead and tried it out.

Things...didn't go smoothly. I'm not sure how much of the issues are just because of the changes to GIMP over the years and which are just because of my inexperience. If it doesn't hurt too much to look at, could you tell me where things went wrong, if it's clear from how it turned out?

I'll note that the clouds I got from the first few steps were very different from the ones pictured, which may have led to other issues down the line.

[arsheesh]

I see what you mean Scarge. Best guess is that you may have applied the "Bump Map" filter to the wrong layer. It's an easy mistake to make. See, when you open the "Bump Map" pop up menu at the top of the window it has a field for you to choose which layer you want to apply the bump map to. I think by default the top layer of your stack is selected (I could be wrong though). So if you don't manually select the layer you want the filter to be applied to then you might end up with it being applied to the wrong layer.

Further, the water looks almost black, which indicates that one of your layers above the Color Map layer is overlapping the ocean portion with a darker color. Again this probably has to do with the bump map layer. Unless you added a layer mask to that layer which blocked out the ocean portion then chances are the bump mapped layer is the layer that is causing your ocean to be so dark.

I'd try starting over from the point just after you've got your new height map from Wilbur and then working through the next few steps of the tutorial with what I've said in mind. Hopefully this will resolve the issue.

Cheers,
-Arsheesh

[waldronate]

The speckled appearance of the bump map is what I often see if I forget to do a "fill basins" step in Wilbur between adding noise and performing "incise flow".