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

[Squessibionaro]

Hi. I used your tutorial earlier this week and I loved it, I'm hoping in the future to use it to build a world for my pathfinder campaign (I may alter the gradients a little to fit my own color palette tastes). I had a question however, I'm fairly experienced in gimp so i found the gimp tutorial fun and easy enough to follow but the Wilbur side of things I had some issues. I had a handful of lakes (morel like Large seas I would suppose) inside my continents and when I went to use the "Fill basins" tool it ended up filling in these sections as well, which I did not like.

As a forced solution I simply made sure the lakes were not selected when applying fill basins, but was wondering what i could do to avoid this in the future (if anything?). I'm at work at the moment and had some spare time to post but that also means i don't have my map to show off.

Thanks for your awesome tutorial and time spent reading this response!

[arsheesh]

Hello Squessibionaro, Waldronate (the creator of Wilbur) may know how to address this question better than I, but what I usually do when I have lakes I want to preserve is to load a selection into Wilbur that basically masks out the areas that you don't want Wilbur to opperate on. To do this you'll need to create a two-tone B&W version of your maps where Black = water (and includes any lakes) and White = land. Save this layer as a separate .png file (Named "Selection" or some such) to whatever map folder you are using for this project. Now load your height map back into Wilbur. Once you've done this go to Select > Load Selection and navigate to the appropriate map folder and select the "Selection" file. You should now see marching ants along the contours of the land. Now any filters you use in Wilber will only be applied to the land itself. Note that you may have to turn this selection off to perform some functions and then reload it once more. Hope that was helpful.

Cheers,
-Arsheesh

[Squessibionaro]

Thanks, I think i'll give that method a shot once I am off work and able to give mapping another go! (I try to make a map, albeit a low quality map with my low level of experience, every couple of days since joining so i can improve).

[Tyler Carrigan]

Hello Arsheesh and anybody else who might happen upon this. As I'm getting (back?) into mapmaking after a brief foray into it years ago, I've been following along with the splendid tutorial that you have provided. It has been relatively clear and concise, easy to follow along with. I spent several hours on the 'tear' stage of the map, airbrushing to smooth things over, and admittedly rushed through it towards the end to move on, as I'm looking to follow this process a time or two, and others as well, to expose myself to techniques.

I am running into an issue though, with the rivers, and making them in Wilbur. The problem is that no matter what I do, rivers refuse to accept the ocean as an ocean, and demand to spawn there. This goes for both the incise flow and the river map mode. I thought of a potential work around, that is, to increase the length of the rivers generated by the river map mode so that they appear more or less as desired on the actual landmasses. Then, I'd move it into GIMP, use the coastline channel as my selection, invert selection, and delete everything else, aka, the rivers that are "outside" the coastline. But I'd still love to understand why this issue is happening. Also, when I set the pre-blur 0.5, as recommend for working with larger maps (I'm working with a 2500 x 5000 image), the landmasses go grey. Example images to help show what is happening are provided.

If you need more details, or have other questions/recommendations before being able to assist, don't hesitate to ask. Any advice or solutions that can be provided would be appreciated as well.

[waldronate]

Wilbur doesn't really have a notion of "ocean". There is a break in the coloring scheme that can make things look like an ocean and some things (like exponent) allow a breakpoint that can simulate something reminiscent of an ocean, but there isn't really an "ocean" as such in Wilbur. What you have in Wilbur is a grayscale image that is used to produce some funny coloring.

The incise flow operation does a connectivity analysis on the whole surface and the removes an amount from each point on the surface proportional to the connectivity of that point. Unless you have a selection that prevents the removal in an area, Wilbur will do this operation to the entire surface. The find rivers operation does the same calculations as Incise Flow, but instead of affecting altitude, it dirties up the pixels in the display texture ("River Length" is exactly analogous to "Flow Exponent").

http://www.fracterra.com/FunWithWilburVol5/index.html shows one way to get lakes and rivers onto the same Wilbur image using an external image editor.

Your landmasses "went gray" because you're using a flow exponent of 6.5, which will give huge negative values in that single black river that you see on your image. When the lighting calculation does its work, it finds the minimum and maximum altitudes on your map and tries to get both of those extremes onto the color map. Because you minimum value is very deep, most of the pixels on the map end up in the highest portions of the display, which is colored white (shades of gray when lighted). I recommend a flow exponent between 0 and 1 for most cases (the default exponent is 2/3, which gives a useful value for common cases; smaller values give longer "river canyons").

[Wertoiuy]

Hello again arsheesh. I have some more questions:

I don't know what I did wrong, but I didn't notice any difference following the bump map stage. From what I have read it is supposed to be a big deal. Do you have any idea why? It doesn't look bad.

If I added the gradients and have then been fiddling with my rivers and lakes, is there a way to do the gradient over? Now that I have looked at it more I would rather it be changed; the colors don't sit right with me. I think you linked a tutorial about creating and editing gradients which I will read, but before I do, can I somehow remove your gradient?

[Thorijel]

Hi,

So I am using this tutorial and am now at the step "tears".

It says to use the 3% airbrush and painfully mesh the mountains with the rest of the maps.

However, how long is that step going to take. I spend some time on it and saw no progress. I just want to have an idea of the time to spend here, as I want to be sure I'm doing things right.

Thanks for the tutorial.

[Thorijel]

One thing that I had a hard time dealing with during the airbrush process was the jagged border of the mountain areas we copy paste. It seems the smudge tool from Gimp alleviate that, and at a small size, really help merge the jagged border with the rest of the map. I will report when I am done.

[Coriolis]

One thing that I had a hard time dealing with during the airbrush process was the jagged border of the mountain areas we copy paste. It seems the smudge tool from Gimp alleviate that, and at a small size, really help merge the jagged border with the rest of the map. I will report when I am done.

A couple of points here. First, the smudge tool can be handy for blending out the edges of your mountain layer. Be careful around hard edges; you can get a sort of choppy result. To avoid this, try smudging diagonal to the hard line. Second, while this can help to a point, it's still really important to spend the time doing your land sculpt, because if the land isn't rising gradually to where your mountains are, you're going to have lots of basins that won't look right when you get through WILBUR. Finally, if you feel nervous about painting directly on your land clouds layer, you can always make a "land sculpt" layer right above it and airbrush on your land sculpt layer instead of the land clouds. This is a minor deviation I make from the tutorial. If you do it, I advise you to up the opacity of your airbrushing to 8-10%.

[Deeds]

Thanks for making this, it has been my main guide for learning to use GIMP for map making (but I am learning lots from other threads and guides too, lots of good stuff on the site here).