15 - [Inner] The Ward of Erahum [Mouse]

[Falconius]

Wow. Yeah I get the feeling Krita is very hardware dependant, just from the way it's designed. It is after all designed for use with a pen and tablet, so it wouldn't be surprising if it's also designed for machines with a little more beef in them too.

[Mouse]

Well... can't do anything about it now - not enough money to upsize.

Best I just get on with GIMP and learn how to do what I need to do with that instead

I might use Krita in the future, but not for anything bigger than about 5000 pi square.

[Rongar]

Is there a way of painting in textures in GIMP?

I have all these lovely stone and grass textures I've made for myself to use on this map, and no way of using them right at the moment.

Sure. I do a lot of texture work in GIMP. There are several ways, I usually open the texture as a new layer placed above the layer I want textured, add a black layer mask to the texture (which renders the layer invisible) and then paint in the mask with white to make the texture appear exactly where I want it. Since those textures are usually about 512x512 seamless, you may have to move the layer around a bit first.

You could also paint your texture into the original layer with the clone tool or bucket fill, but I never do that as that allows for no changes if I change my mind later on. My advice is to always use a separate layer.

If you need further instructions, let me know and I'll try to help. I'm no GIMP professional but I usually get it to work - one way or another.

And since we are complaining about our hardware; I use a dual core CPU from 2008, a graphics chip from 2004 and 3 GB RAM. Ancient hardware. But the GIMP manages. My current project is roughly 6000x5000 with over a 100 layers. Not all of them image size, of course, but still.

Lovely map, by the way. You're really good. I've checked your albums yesterday and was quite impressed with what I saw. I wanted to rep some of your work, but I don't think I was able to. Not in the albums anyway.


Regards,

~~Rongar

[Mouse]

Oooh! Thank you Rongar - both for all the advice and the compliments

I was studying GIMP layer masks earlier on YouTube, and when you described painting on the mask to reveal patches of the texture it all suddenly fell into place in my mind and I can finally understand what is meant by a layer mask

CC3 equivalent to that is called a Colour Key sheet effect - so no surprise that I didn't manage to tie the two together all by myself!

Haha! The penny has finally dropped

It's great to know that you can produce maps like Wörld of Metal with a machine that's even less impressive than my little laptop! 100 layers? Wow! Way to go

[Rongar]

You're welcome, I'm always glad to help.

Yep, 124 at the moment and counting. But a whole bunch of them are just text layers which aren't very taxing. Small layers in general aren't, so always crop your layers to the size they need to be. Saves a lot of resources.

[Mouse]

Yet another good tip - thank you

[Redrobes]

A quick solution to your PC would be to buy a USB memory stick for about £30 and keep it permenantly stuck into one of the USB slots. It will appear as a drive so you can then move your swap file on to it and also use it as an extra backup. By sticking a 8GB or so swap file on the stick you could find that the speed of access to it could be faster than the hard drive. USB comes in basic USB2 and USB3. If you PC is really old then it will have USB only, about 5 years ago it went to USB2 and modern ones are USB3. USB2 and USB3 are very fast indeed. All the USB types are backwards compatible so if you buy a USB3 stick you can put it into a USB or USB2 slot on the PC.

Having another flash based drive as a backup is also a good idea in case your hard drive fails regardless of whether it speeds up your PC.

[Mouse]

Thanks Red

I have an external HDD I use for weekly backups. Would that serve just as well, or is it a speed thing with memory sticks?

The external drive has about 150 GB free of 500.

Its very precious to me, though, since apart from being my laptop backup, its the only remaining record of all the writing and art I did on my old machine - a copy of the surviving hard drive from a RAID system I fried a couple of years ago, and I don't want to use it to boost performance just for a couple of maps if there's any risk to the rest of the data I've got on there.

[Straf]

The external hard drive will more than likely be like your internal one, with slower access. USB memory sticks are solid state and tend to work a bit quicker.

You can set the new image memory size in GIMP so it helps itself to more RAM. The more it has the less it needs to access the swap file on the hard drive. Although your machine has 4GB of RAM that may not all be available as the graphics card needs memory too. The system RAM is often shared with the graphics card, so it may be that the amount of RAM available to the system is 3GB, or less. Then there are system files that get pre-loaded into RAM reducing the amount available for programs even further. It may be possible to change the amount of RAM shared with the graphics card in your BIOS.

[Mouse]

How do you adjust the memory size in GIMP?

And then... how much is enough without threatening other (possibly more important) systems?