[Award Winner] Using GIMP to Create an Artistic Regional RPG Map

[BlackMojo]

Which colors should i use for the forests? thanks.

[Karro]

I got it!!! Thanks a bunch... the terminology in the tutorial confused me. Have copious amounts of rep.

Btw, is there a way to get Snow on the tops of the mountains? I was thinking of making a layer mask on a copy of the mountain bump map with a white gradient.

The easiest way to get snow is to just add a transparent layer set to screen mode, and paint with a white soft brush at partial opacity.

Alternately, create a gradient with white at the end instead of the FG-BG gradient suggested in the tutorial.

-Rob A>

I basically do what Rob A just suggested - add a transparent layer above the color, below the bumpmap and I just paint with a soft white brush along the ridges and peaks where I want snow to go.

As for forests - I believe the color palette linked at the beginning of the tutorial have a couple colors for forests (or maybe just one? I can't recall). Use any of those, to start. You can experiment with your own greens later.

[BlackMojo]

I ditched the snow idea. My mountains have a nice golden-brown color that didnt go with the snow.

As for the forests, all that there is is a green called shoreline (???) so i guess i could use that. Can you do it without normalizing? I get this pukish green when i normalize...

[Karro]

I ditched the snow idea. My mountains have a nice golden-brown color that didnt go with the snow.

As for the forests, all that there is is a green called shoreline (???) so i guess i could use that. Can you do it without normalizing? I get this pukish green when i normalize...

There should be several greens, IIRC. If not, maybe pick your own (something nice and earthy looking is where you'll want to go... so if your green is too bright, basically, just increase the balance of red in it a little).

I'd avoid normalizing the green for the forests, as I think you're right, it gets kind of not-great looking when you do.

[Aidan]

I ditched the snow idea. My mountains have a nice golden-brown color that didnt go with the snow.

As for the forests, all that there is is a green called shoreline (???) so i guess i could use that. Can you do it without normalizing? I get this pukish green when i normalize...

There are four other greens called ditch, low ground, medium ground and high ground if you're using the palette that RobA included. I think I used a gradient between ditch and medium ground. And yes, don't normalize. What I did do was follow the suggestion to duplicate the forest color layer and set it's blend mode to grain merge.

[Highlieche]

Hello RobA. I have a question. How do i get your color palate to open up? When i try to unzip the folder it doesnt let me open the gpl file.

[RobA]

All you should have to do is unzip the gpl into your palettes directory. Alternately, just use the png and the eye-dropper tool to pick the colours as you need them (which is what I do more commonly, rather than building custom palettes).

-Rob A>

[Highlieche]

sweet thanks. however, upon further readings of this tutorial i realized its inadequate for my purposes. You said yourself that your Gimp tuts dont work for making whole continents. could you be kind enough to point me to a Gimp tut that can show me how to make a geographical/political continent plz?

[Karro]

sweet thanks. however, upon further readings of this tutorial i realized its inadequate for my purposes. You said yourself that your Gimp tuts dont work for making whole continents. could you be kind enough to point me to a Gimp tut that can show me how to make a geographical/political continent plz?

I don't know that there's a full-on, GIMP Continent tutorial currently posted here. However, my advice would be: run through RobA's regional map tutorial once on a practice map, and you should learn enough about how GIMP works that you can adapt the skills developed to creating a continent map yourself. That's actually what I did... so that my still-under-construction world map is about 80% RobA GIMP tutorial and 20% original tinkering to get the effects I want.

[RobA]

Karro hit the nail on the head. My intent was to really introduce many of the Gimp basics along with making a map, so if you are a newbie to Gimp, following the tutorial is a good way to learn many of the features that would be useful for any style of mapping!

-Rob A>