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

[dlaporte7271]

Using the tutorial and making good progress up until the 'bump map' The instructions are to fill the layer with 50% gray...but I don't know what that refers to. Help please?

dlaporte

[arsheesh]

Hey Dlaporte, in your toolbox, if you double click on either of the colors in the "Foreground/Background" icon, a window will appear called "Change Foreground/Background Color". In this window on the right side you will see 6 color spectrums. The third down (from the top) has a "V" (Value) in front of it, and ranges from black to white. To the right of this is a field for changing the value. Change the value to 50, and then apply that to your layer.

Cheers,
-Arsheesh

[Eliazar]

Hey! I'm new here (and mainly because of this tutorial), and it's really a lot of fun and well written. However, I do have one thing that's not working out well (might have been addressed already somewhere in the depths of this thread, but I though I might ask before I read through the 50 pages): the rivers. On what layer am I supposed to draw them? It says the grass layer, but then the screen shot looks like the land layer. When I draw on grass, it doesn't go through the dirt, and also makes brown stains on the sea, but drawing on the land layer (or a duplicated land layer) doesn't seem to have any effect. Anybody knows what I am talking about and knows the solution?

[Gidde]

Best way to do it is actually make a new layer for rivers, on top of the others.

[wisemoon]

Hello everyone,

I have really found RobA's tutorial to be useful. However, as a technical writer I also noticed a lot of ways it could be improved. When I first started using the tutorial a couple of years ago, I actually asked RobA about whether he would be updating/revising it and he said no, it took too much time to create in the first place. So, I decided to take it upon myself to update and revise the tutorial. I am updating it for version 2.6 of GIMP, putting the steps into a clearer numbered format, and generally rewriting things just a bit to make the steps clearer and more understandable. I am also breaking the PDF up into smaller pieces, and hopefully the breaks will be in logical places in the process.

I'm posting the first part here, more to come as I work through it.

EDIT: Inserted finished example map, corrected some errors/omissions in PDF.
Using GIMP to Create an Artistic Regional RPG Map Pt 1.pdf

[Seraphine_Harmonium]

Hey! I'm new here (and mainly because of this tutorial), and it's really a lot of fun and well written. However, I do have one thing that's not working out well (might have been addressed already somewhere in the depths of this thread, but I though I might ask before I read through the 50 pages): the rivers. On what layer am I supposed to draw them? It says the grass layer, but then the screen shot looks like the land layer. When I draw on grass, it doesn't go through the dirt, and also makes brown stains on the sea, but drawing on the land layer (or a duplicated land layer) doesn't seem to have any effect. Anybody knows what I am talking about and knows the solution?

I put my rivers in the land layer, and try to do this before I make the Land Mask. Then when you are making the grass and various other things, your rivers show through right away. And I keep the land mask layer around, so that I can handily also use it as a bump mask, giving the rivers a beveled edge and making the land rise out of the water a bit.

[wisemoon]

Okay, so I am working on revising this tutorial, as I posted earlier. Unfortunately, I have run into a bug/problem at the "create ocean" section of the tutorial! I can't seem to get the gradient map to work right. Instead of filling the layer with a gradient from light blue to dark blue (I have the foreground and background colors set to the correct colors), it uses a black-and-white gradient instead! I have fiddled with a dozen or more settings and cannot for the life of me figure out why it is not working. I have used this before and it worked fine, but that was long enough ago that I have no idea what is going wrong or what I did differently in the past.

Anyone else run into this problem? I would really appreciate it if you could help me out, since I can't even finish this revision project until I can get the gradient map to work right.

Thanks,

wisemoon

[Seraphine_Harmonium]

Unfortunately, I have run into a bug/problem at the "create ocean" section of the tutorial! I can't seem to get the gradient map to work right. Instead of filling the layer with a gradient from light blue to dark blue (I have the foreground and background colors set to the correct colors), it uses a black-and-white gradient instead! I have fiddled with a dozen or more settings and cannot for the life of me figure out why it is not working.

Check that your foreground and background are the right colors, and that your try messing with your gradient tool. Maybe check your Gradient tool that it is on a linear, foreground-background gradient fill. Because I think that changing the gradient tool settings will change what the gradient map will do.

[wisemoon]

Hi! Thanks for your tip. Actually, the things you mentioned were all correctly set, but I tried using the Gradient Tool instead of the Gradient Map, just to see if it would work, and it did a grayscale too. So then I checked the color mode (Image>Mode) and for some reason the layer or image was set to Grayscale! So I reset it to RGB and it worked fine.

wisemoon

[Seraphine_Harmonium]

Glad to hear you figured it out. That's actually happened to me too, now that you mention it. Took me forever to work out what was wrong.