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

[arsheesh]

Glad to here the tutorial was useful to you. You can also swap out the lime greenish color for a color that better transitions from brown to green to get rid of the halo effect. I chose that color to add a bit more contrast but it won't work well for some heightmaps. Nice looking mountains by the way.

Cheers,
-Arsheesh

[Solitus]

Thanks for this tutorial! So far it has gone very smoothly; however, I am concerned because my mountain clouds don't look like the picture in the tutorial. They seem rather gray and indistinct, whereas the picture has much darker areas and seems more detailed. I am using a different ratio (1100 pixels by 500). I did adjust the x/y values of the noise to compensate for that though. Here is a picture: https://ibb.co/K5hf2Ty

Any ideas

[willuwontu]

Thanks for the tutorial, was looking for a way to map out my world and came across this tutorial on your old website. Not really familiar with Gimp or mapmaking and I rushed a bit towards the end but I think it came out alright.

Aeryth Surface Final-Small.jpg

I'm probably going to end up remaking it, but here's a mix of notes about the tutorial and things for myself so I can grab ideas.

• Floodfills are great for setting ocean height in wilbur, helps avoid pesky height differentials.
• I had no idea what I was doing with the bump maps, I just did a bump map without selecting anything and nothing changed. I'm happy you had a comment about it early on in the thread, and I was able to fix it.
• I ended up adding a rivers layer, ran a gradient of blues from cold to hot to cold, and used the intersection of land and river masks to restrict it to just the inland waters. I should've taken the time to paint lakes in as well.
• I couldn't do incise flows in wilbur, but I managed to run erosion cycles, which gave me river-esque things? Seems like a combination of precipitation cycles, incise flow and fill basins to me.
• I still need to do the land glow at some point.
• Gotta figure out desert placements
• Since it's an equatorial map, I need to figure out how to properly wrap the heightmap so it follows the shape of the lands. (Make masks of selections of continental areas in question, expand canvas, place another copy, make height maps, place copy w/ mask over original map and flatten?)
• Poles man, I gotta figure out how to do the poles. Some sort of polar conversion so I can work on the polar regions as actual continents?
• Maybe work on continents in individual files for height maps before reincorporating them into the overall map for coloration? Would help with wrapped continents.
• Wilbur hates equatorial maps and makes rivers run into the poles instead of away.

[RobertWinslow]

Arsheesh, this is a fantastic tutorial. It showcased some very useful techniques, and the layout was very clear.

Here are a couples maps I made playing around with these techniques:

PigIslandColor.png

lionsManeAtlas2.png