Can I use an animated brush with GIMPressionist to make a forest?

[lekkin007]

So I have loved GIMP for many years now, though I'm by no means an expert, and one of my friends is very into creating his own fantasy continent, and I volunteered to help turn his hand drawings into cool looking maps! I've had a lot of fun learning new techniques through the tutorials here, and I have a question about a different application of one of them in general.

Here's the tutorial in question: https://www.cartographersguild.com/a...2&d=1461335828

Basically, it goes through how to make animated brushes for mountains/trees, and then use these to paint the features onto a map for a nice effect. I know GIMPressionist can be used to brush entire regions, so I was thinking that since forests tend to be more blobby and less linear (unlike mountains), it would be nice to be able to have GIMPressionist brush over an entire region with a custom animated tree brush. I could get more randomness with size, for example, and not have to do it by hand (though I'm sure it wouldn't take too long, it's more of curiosity on my part). However, GIMPressionist brushes seem to have a different style of file, and I can't tell if they can use any sort of animated brush at all.

Any suggestions either for how to create an animated GIMPressionist brush, or another tool GIMP has that would help me brush over an entire region with a set of brushes? I guess I could just make some splotchy noise, make a selection from that, path the selection, and as long as the path is dense enough in the region I could brush the path. Any other ideas?

[Mouse]

I don't know anything about GIMPressionist, but I've made a perfectly good animated forest brush in GIMP.

Instead of me rabbiting on for ages about how I did it, this video explains it a lot better than I can.

Just two things: There seems to be a confusion in the video where the narrator calls foliage 'foilage', and if you want to use your animated brush at a respectable size one day you would do well to start by making it a lot larger than just 30 px square. Mine were 500 px square

What the brush does, and what it looks like depends on what you draw on each of the layers it uses as the different images in the animation of the brush. The one I made was top view trees (round green blobs with a bit of shading), and each layer had a different sized ragged blob tree of a slightly different green.

Hope that helps.

[lekkin007]

Thanks! It was nice to see some different types of ranks (the random, incremental, and angular). Any suggestions on the ways to use these in a fun way?

Also, do you have any suggestions for filling large areas without it looking like you are just tracing out lines with the brush (e.g., with an animated forest brush)?

[Tenia]

Hi,
For what I know, GIMPressionist don't use animated brushes per se, but you can theoretically (not tested) :
- use your own made .pgm image (it seems that GIMPressionist can read .gbr files too) if you have previously copied them in the GIMPressionist directory for brushes
- select any image or layer that is currently loaded in Gimp as brush (https://docs.gimp.org/2.8/en/plug-in...essionist.html => Brush tab)
Hope that helps too

[Mouse]

Thanks! It was nice to see some different types of ranks (the random, incremental, and angular). Any suggestions on the ways to use these in a fun way?

Also, do you have any suggestions for filling large areas without it looking like you are just tracing out lines with the brush (e.g., with an animated forest brush)?

If you increase the spacing from the default 20 to at least 130 the 'flow' will be a lot slower, but if you use a tight circular scribbling motion the trees will appear to be a lot more randomly spaced.

This isn't a finished map, but the trees here were placed in exactly the way I just described.