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

[arsheesh]

Hello again arsheesh. I have some more questions:

I don't know what I did wrong, but I didn't notice any difference following the bump map stage. From what I have read it is supposed to be a big deal. Do you have any idea why? It doesn't look bad.

If I added the gradients and have then been fiddling with my rivers and lakes, is there a way to do the gradient over? Now that I have looked at it more I would rather it be changed; the colors don't sit right with me. I think you linked a tutorial about creating and editing gradients which I will read, but before I do, can I somehow remove your gradient?

The bump map filter doesn't always select the correct layer, sometimes you have to manually set which later the filter will operate on within the filter menu. You can remove any gradient within your gradient doc by selecting it and then clicking on the "Delete this Gradient" (it loos like an X) button at the bottom of the doc. If you want to delete the gradient "map" layer that you created and start again, you delete that the way you delete any layer in GIMP: use the "Delete this Layer" at the bottom of the layers doc.

One thing that I had a hard time dealing with during the airbrush process was the jagged border of the mountain areas we copy paste. It seems the smudge tool from Gimp alleviate that, and at a small size, really help merge the jagged border with the rest of the map. I will report when I am done.

Yup, this stage takes a lot of time. There are some work arounds, as Coriolis has mentioned, but it just comes down to time and effort. One other trick that I've found to speeding up the process however is as follows. Once all of the individual mountain layers have been blended and merged together use the Select by Color tool to select anywhere that is transparent on that layer (you should see marching ants surrounding all of the mountain clouds. Feather the selection by about 20 pix or so (you'll need to play around with the exact pix): Select > Feather > 20 pix > OK. Now click delete. You should see now that the edges of your mountain clouds are no longer as jagged but are now slightly transparent. You'll still need to do blending after this step but it ought to save a good bit of time.

A couple of points here. First, the smudge tool can be handy for blending out the edges of your mountain layer. Be careful around hard edges; you can get a sort of choppy result. To avoid this, try smudging diagonal to the hard line. Second, while this can help to a point, it's still really important to spend the time doing your land sculpt, because if the land isn't rising gradually to where your mountains are, you're going to have lots of basins that won't look right when you get through WILBUR. Finally, if you feel nervous about painting directly on your land clouds layer, you can always make a "land sculpt" layer right above it and airbrush on your land sculpt layer instead of the land clouds. This is a minor deviation I make from the tutorial. If you do it, I advise you to up the opacity of your airbrushing to 8-10%.

Thanks for being helpful on this thread, I appreciate it.

Thanks for making this, it has been my main guide for learning to use GIMP for map making (but I am learning lots from other threads and guides too, lots of good stuff on the site here).

My pleasure.