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

[arsheesh]

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?

The bump map filter doesn't always select the correct layer, sometimes you have to manually set which later the filter will operate on within the filter menu. You can remove any gradient within your gradient doc by selecting it and then clicking on the "Delete this Gradient" (it loos like an X) button at the bottom of the doc. If you want to delete the gradient "map" layer that you created and start again, you delete that the way you delete any layer in GIMP: use the "Delete this Layer" at the bottom of the layers doc.

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.

Yup, this stage takes a lot of time. There are some work arounds, as Coriolis has mentioned, but it just comes down to time and effort. One other trick that I've found to speeding up the process however is as follows. Once all of the individual mountain layers have been blended and merged together use the Select by Color tool to select anywhere that is transparent on that layer (you should see marching ants surrounding all of the mountain clouds. Feather the selection by about 20 pix or so (you'll need to play around with the exact pix): Select > Feather > 20 pix > OK. Now click delete. You should see now that the edges of your mountain clouds are no longer as jagged but are now slightly transparent. You'll still need to do blending after this step but it ought to save a good bit of time.

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%.

Thanks for being helpful on this thread, I appreciate it.

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).

My pleasure.

[Fynnarius]

Hey,
first of all, thank you for your fantastic tutorial(s), but I've been getting weird results when applying the landmass-layer mask, during "Isolating the land" on page 3. My Layer is far darker than what is shown in the pdf and playing with brightness and contrast doesn't help much.

darklandclouds.PNG

Any idea what I could've done wrong?

[arsheesh]

Hey,
first of all, thank you for your fantastic tutorial(s), but I've been getting weird results when applying the landmass-layer mask, during "Isolating the land" on page 3. My Layer is far darker than what is shown in the pdf and playing with brightness and contrast doesn't help much.

darklandclouds.PNG

Any idea what I could've done wrong?

Yeah that does look a bit dark. This may sound like a silly question, but are you sure that the "brightness/contrast" filter is being applied to the layer rather than the layer mask? Because in the image you uploaded it almost looks as if the layer mask is what is currently being selected.

[Fynnarius]

Yeah that does look a bit dark. This may sound like a silly question, but are you sure that the "brightness/contrast" filter is being applied to the layer rather than the layer mask? Because in the image you uploaded it almost looks as if the layer mask is what is currently being selected.

Thanks for the quick response. That was exactly it. I'm facepalming so hard right now^^'
Had even downgraded to the old version of Gimp you used when making this tutorial because I wasn't able to figure the problem out...

[arsheesh]

Thanks for the quick response. That was exactly it. I'm facepalming so hard right now^^'
Had even downgraded to the old version of Gimp you used when making this tutorial because I wasn't able to figure the problem out...

Ha ha, no worries, there's a big learning curve to GIMP and little things like knowing whether or not a layer or layer mask are selected are very easy to overlook. Glad to here you got the issue sorted out though. Cheers.

[fabiocmg]

Hello. This is a fantastic Tutorial. I tried with already existing map (The Tagmar Map, a pt-br setting), so I used less the Wilbur to determine rivers and more Gimp, but I'm satisfied with the result until now. Afterall, I'm an amateur!
gwXuoGv.jpg

I would like to add one tip that maybe can be useful for someone:
This site is a good source to copy and paste the mountains, other than create it rendering clouds. To do so, zoom somewhere in the world, print screen the image and create from clipboard in gimp. Then select from it to paste as mountains and hills in the main map.

[Coriolis]

Thanks for the link! Using real-life height maps can be enormously helpful and a great time-saver. I modified a height map of the British Isles into a post-apocalyptic map I made a couple of years ago.

[Yul]

This tutorial made me come on this forum. Your concept is wonderfull, and Wilbur an amazing software! Thank you for your video, a whole new world is open to me now!

[arsheesh]

Hello. This is a fantastic Tutorial. I tried with already existing map (The Tagmar Map, a pt-br setting), so I used less the Wilbur to determine rivers and more Gimp, but I'm satisfied with the result until now. Afterall, I'm an amateur!
gwXuoGv.jpg

Nice work fabiocmg. I'm glad the tutorial was of use to you.

This tutorial made me come on this forum. Your concept is wonderfull, and Wilbur an amazing software! Thank you for your video, a whole new world is open to me now!

I'm really happy to here that. However, as of yet I've not made any videos so I was confused for a second. However a quick Google search shows that it turns out that, unknown to me, Will Erwin over on Youtube made an an interesting adaptation of this using a clever way to generate a height map. In case anyone is interested in checking that out here is the link to the video.

Cheers,
-Arsheesh

[Coriolis]

Nice work fabiocmg. I'm glad the tutorial was of use to you.



I'm really happy to here that. However, as of yet I've not made any videos so I was confused for a second. However a quick Google search shows that it turns out that, unknown to me, Will Erwin over on Youtube made an an interesting adaptation of this using a clever way to generate a height map. In case anyone is interested in checking that out here is the link to the video.

Cheers,
-Arsheesh

(Will Erwin here)

I made that video tutorial after someone on DeviantArt asked how I made my astronomy-based maps several years back. Nice to see that it's steering people here to the original technique.

The Eriond technique continues to be at the core of my approach to regional mapping. Although I've done all sorts of variations on it (using modified real height maps, X-ray images, and astronomy images as my baseline height map), and though I've developed my own variations on Arsheesh's steps, the Eriond tutorial remains the best all-around cartography tutorial I've ever seen.