# Mapping Resources > Tutorials/How-To >  [Award Winner] Eriond - A Tutorial for GIMP & Wilbur

## arsheesh

Some time ago I promised to create a Tutorial for my world map of Eriond.  But hadn't gotten very far along in the process when my PhD began and life became a whirlwind.  Now it's spring break and I've finally had an opportunity to return to this project.  About the tutorial, as advertised, this is a tutorial for GIMP and Wilbur that walks you through how to make a photo-realistic map similar to that of the one shown below.

A word of caution.  This is an Intermediate/Advanced skill level tutorial.  The techniques used in this walk through are difficult, and I assume that the reader already has both a working knowledge of GIMP and a rudimentary knowledge of map creation.  Also, one tutorial that is really helpful to read as a companion to this one is Notsonoble's GIMP Gradient Tool Basics _(EDIT: this tutorial has temporarily gone missing, until it is found, please use this tutorial instead_), since my tutorial assumes a working knowledge of gradients.  Finally, I have uploaded a set of gradients that I use within the tutorial.  I recommend downloading and installing these before beginning.  That said, I hope this is useful to some of you (*EDIT*: I found several small mistakes in the original tutorial so I have uploaded a corrected version).

Cheers,
-Arsheesh

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## LonewandererD

Really like the effect, especially on the mountains, any chance someone can get a Photoshop translation on this?

-D-

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## Gidde

I'll totally be checking this out, that looks great! Thanks for posting!

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## AMichael

I can't wait! This is exactly what I've been looking for.

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## Boundary Layer

I don't usually post here (in fact, this is my first), I'm more of a lurker just looking for inspiration - but I cannot resist the urge to break the silence and say thank-you for this.

I'm just getting (back) into map making, and this is exactly the help that I need.  In the 2 hours or so I've spent working my way through this tutorial on a test piece I've got a much more professional looking map than I ever dreamed I could make.  I just need to spend more time blending the mountains into the rest of the terrain before heading into Wilbur (I got anxious).

I'm certainly not an intermediate or advanced GIMP user, but I was still able to follow along.  So, to others who are novices with GIMP, no need to be discouraged by the warning in first post - give it a try, and if you get stuck, Google can help.

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## arsheesh

@LonewandererD - I wish I had Photoshop and knew how to use it.  If I did I'd have written this tutorial for PS as well.  However, aside from the kind cloud patterns that I am using to generate the height map, I'm pretty sure that the rest of the steps in this tutorial are easily translatable into PS, and of course the instructions on Wilbur will be the same regardless.

@Gidde, AMichael and Boundary Layer - Thanks for posting.  Please feel free to let me know if you come across any problem areas in the Tutorial (e.g. areas lacking in clarity).

Cheers,
-Arsheesh

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## Boundary Layer

Arsheesh,

I got lost between unifying the oceans and bump mapping the height map.  
The 'Land Bumps' layer is referred to in the Unifying the Oceans section, but is not actually created until the following section.  So, it was unclear on the first read of Unifying the Oceans which layer should be merged onto 'Temperate'.  And in Bump Mapping the Height Map it wasn't exactly clear what you meant in the first line when you refer to the 'Color Map'.  
I think I understood your intent though.

Test Piece:

I'll have to spend more time blending the mountains in and getting a river mask that works on future maps.  I was rushing to get to something that looked finished, so I used a big brush with high opacity to blend the mountains.  The strokes are still visible in some places.

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## arsheesh

Hi Boundary Layer,

Thanks so much for letting me know about this.  "Color Map" was an earlier reference for "Temperate" in the tutorial, but I went ahead and changed it later on and must have missed this one.  Also, the reference to "Bump Map" in the Unifying the Oceans section should have been a reference to "WHM Copy", so this was a typo as well.  I've gone ahead and corrected this and uploaded a new corrected pdf to this page.  

As to your WIP, the colors look good, but I can't make out the "bump map" detail on the mountains.  Did you have the "Land Bumps" and "Mt Bumps" layers hidden when you uploaded the image?

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## Boundary Layer

> As to your WIP, the colors look good, but I can't make out the "bump map" detail on the mountains.  Did you have the "Land Bumps" and "Mt Bumps" layers hidden when you uploaded the image?


Oops, you're right.  I didn't notice that.  New WIP, better example:


Anyways, I don't mean to thread-jack by posting a bunch of my own images.  If I post more in the future I'll do so in a separate thread.
Thanks again.

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## Beaumains

This will probably help me out a lot; thanks Arsheesh!

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## arsheesh

@ Boundary Layer, that's looking better!  I like the overall shape allot more, and your sculpting work has really paid off: the mountains blend into their surroundings naturally.

@ Beaumains, thanks, I hope that is of use to you.

Cheers,
-Arsheesh

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## ZacheryGangrel

I had fun making this and definitely had fun learning a new style. I used an older map of mine as a base, I didn't put as much work into the mountains as I would like, So I will likely go back and redo them.

I only had 1 issue, for some reason no matter what I did, the blur filter did not work on my Land Glow layer. It showed the blurring in the preview window, but whenever I applied it, there was no blur to be seen. So there is no shallow waters to be found here  :Razz:

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## arsheesh

Thanks for the feedback Zach.  I'm not sure what the deal with the blur was.  Unless of course you had the land or seal selected when you applied the blur: the selection will prevent the blur from affecting the area outside of the selection.  Your mountains look pretty good (though I might add a bit more airbrushing to the land clouds layer at the base of the mountains to help them blend just a bit more.  I'm not sure if it's just the resolution or not, but I couldn't quite make out the other bump-map details.  Otherwise, looks good.

Cheers,
-Arsheesh

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## TregMallin

Thanks for this tutorial, Arsheesh.  I look forward to working through it this week.  

The GIMP Gradient Basics tutorial that you mentioned above is missing now.

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## arsheesh

Huh, now that's strange.  I tried doing an advanced search for this thread and couldn't find it.  I then did a search for the tutorial using Google and found a link to the tutorial (as posted here at the Guild), but when I clicked on the link it took me to a "No Thread Specified" error page.  So I'm not sure what to make of it.  Either the tutorial some how got deleted or it's been misplaced.  I've written a note to the admins about it so hopefully someone knows what the deal is.  If not, perhaps I'll either expand the tutorial to include the bit about Gradients, or I'll create a separate tutorial covering this info.  Unfortunately I haven't the time to do either at the moment, so hopefully the tutorial gets found.

Cheers,
-Arsheesh

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## libraryian

I can't seem to be able to open the my map in Wilbur as there is no option for a .xcf file. Am I suppose to export the flattened image file as a .bmp or .jpg, or other format? Otherwise, everything has worked great so far, I'll admit that you were right on the "there will be tears" section of the airbrushing the mountains. It took me forever to actually see any results.

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## arsheesh

Hi there libraryian, yes, you are correct.  You need to save the flattened version of your height map as a .jpg rather than an .xcf.  I guess I forgot to mention this in the tutorial.  I will have to correct that.  Glad to here that despite the tears, the tutorial is working well for you so far.  If you do come across any other problem areas in the tutorial though feel free to let me know.

Cheers,
-Arsheesh

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## arsheesh

@Tregmallin Apparently Notsonoble's tutorial on Gradient Tool Basics has gone missing (some of the admins here can't even seem to find it), however I have found a tutorial on About.com that goes over the same concepts.  You can find it here.  Hope that helps.

Cheers,
-Arsheesh

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## TregMallin

@arsheesh That looks like just the ticket.

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## FlyingIcarus

I love this to death. Thanks for making this, it looks great, even for a newbie like me.

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## dlaporte7271

Hey Arsheesh...using your tut to try and make my world map...getting stuck on the copy/paste from mountain cloud layer to mountain layers....cant seem to get anything to actually paste to a layer...The free select/copy/paste aught to be intuitive...but apparently I'm doing something wrong...or it works differently in GIMP.  Suggestions?

Dave

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## arsheesh

Hm, well without knowing a bit more I'm not sure exactly what the problem is.  However, if the problem is that, after creating a free selection, you attempt to copy and then paste a mountain selection from the Mountain Clouds layer into the Mountains 1 or 2 layer, and you don't end up getting any pasted layer appearing at all, then the problem may be that when you clicked on copy the layer you were copying from was not the Mountain clouds layer, but rather from some other (possibly blank) layer.  I make that mistake allot.  Going back and forth from the Mountain Clouds to the Mountains 1 and 2 layers I sometimes find that the layer I ended up copying from was either Mountains 1 or 2 (which transparent) rather than my Mountain clouds layer.  So when I go to paste the layer on my Mountains 1 or 2 layers, nothing shows up.  So this _might_ be the problem for you as well.  If not, would you mind providing a bit more detail and/or providing a screenshot to work with. 

EDIT: another thought occurred to me.  If the problem isn't that nothing is showing up, but rather that the pasted layer does end up showing up, but as a "Floating Selection" rather than an element pasted directly onto the Mountains 1 or 2 layers, and you want to know how to merge the floating selection onto the Mountains 1 or 2 layers, then you just have to hit that little Anchor symbol (Anchor the Floating Layer) at the bottom of the layers dialogue (see attached image).  However, make sure you make the necessary modifications to the selection (e.g. rotate and/or resize it) before anchoring it.



Cheers,
-Arsheesh

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## dlaporte7271

Wow...quick reply!  I'll try again and see if I can give you some more specifics...

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## dlaporte7271

what's the point of the anchor?  Why the additional step?  Why not just make 'paste' add the selected image where you want it?...anyway...I did something else that worked...but maybe it's not working as it should...I make the selection with the free select tool...right click, edit, copy...the selection appears in the little clipboard on the lower right.  I think I can still manipulate/resize/rotate the selection...but I end up choosing the brush tool and then selecting my new brush and plopping it down that way.  Does that do what I need it to do or am I unwittingly doing something I shouldn't?

dlaporte

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## arsheesh

Funny, I just replied with an explanation of this to your WIP thread.  However, for the benefit of anyone else who may be having the same questions/issues, I'll reply here as well.  While the "Floating Selection" is a bit odd at first, it is actually a nice feature, because it allows you to manipulate the floating selection as much as you like before anchoring it to the layer you pasted it too.  So, a step by step walk through of the process of copying and pasting selections from one layer to another layer in GIMP would be as follows:

1.  Make the layer you want to copy from the active layer (click on that layer);
2.  Use your Free Select tool to create a selection of the desired area;
3.  Right click on the image and go to: Edit > Copy;
4.  Make the layer you want to paste to the active layer;
5.  Right click on the image and go to: Edit > Paste (this will create a "Floating Selection: Pasted Layer" above that layer);
6.  Manipulate the pasted layer if you so desire (e.g. rotate it, resize it etc);
7.  In the Layers Dialogue, click on "Anchor Floating Selection".

That should do it.  As to the method you suggest, that works as well, though it will create a "Dropped Buffer" layer each time you to this, and you will eventually want to merged these all down into the appropriate Mountain 1 and Mountain 2 layers, so I guess in the end, either method works.

Cheers,
-Arsheesh

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## vorropohaiah

i love the use of difference clouds to create the mountains. I'll have to try that.

Never used wilbur though; i wonder if i can get the same effect done with PS?

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## arsheesh

You definitely should be able to achieve the same, or at least a similar effects with PS.  The clouds might be slightly different, I don't know, you might need to experiemt arround a bit to find what settings work best in PS.  

Cheers,
-Arsheesh

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## AlphaOmega

is there any wilbur equivalent for Mac OS X?  It sucks seeing this awesome tutorial and finding out I can't use it :p

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## arsheesh

Hi there AlphaOmega.  I didn't realize that the current Wilbur release wasn't supported by Mac OS X.  This seems like a question better suited to Waldronate, the developer of Wilbur.  I'm not sure if older releases are supported by Mac or not, but he would know.  If not, I'm afraid I don't know what a substitute would be.  Try leaving Waldronate a message and see what he says.

Cheers,
-Arsheesh

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## AlphaOmega

Thank you very much, I shall drop him a line as soon as I have enough posts to. :p  Also, I found something called Wilma, and it's supposed to be the Mac's equivalent to Wilbur, but I don't really see a lot of information on it.

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## Morgan_R

Thanks for the tutorial, it was really helpful! Here's my result:

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## arsheesh

That turned out fairly well Morgan.  You managed to blend the mountains fairly well (which is one of the tougher bits).  My only bit of corrective feedback would be that the map looks just a bit hazy, as if a Gaussian blur had been applied to it.  Also, there isn't a whole lot of texture on the mountain areas.  I'm not quite sure why this is, and so I don't know quite what to recommend to fix these issues.  That said, even with these little faults I think it turned out pretty well.  Great job.

Cheers,
-Arsheesh

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## Bill B.

I'm glad, myself, to see Morgan's post. I printed out the tutorial a few weeks ago and tried...and failed to produce any kind of map. My map at one brief point looked something like a map but when I did the next step I lost it, ending up with what seemed to be just the bump map. Seeing Morgan's work reassures me the problem has to be between the keyboard and the chair (as expected!).  :Razz:  I'm planning to try again soon. Each try teaches me more, so I'm already learning tricks even if I'm not yet getting what I'm trying for.  :Smile: 

That said, I'd be interested in finding out if it was indeed a Gaussian blur that was the issue. To me, it looks great but a little bit as if looking down on it through a very thin layer of clouds. Kinda cool, I think.

Bill B.

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## arsheesh

Welcome to the Guild Bill.  You picked one of the more difficult tutorials to learn with, so don't feel too discouraged.  But if you post up a WIP of your map and the step(s) you are having trouble with I can try to offer advice where I can.  

Cheers,
-Arsheesh

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## Bill B.

Thanks for the welcome, Arsheesh.

I had noticed it was mentioned somewhere that it wasn't exactly a beginner's tutorial, so I went into that with both eyes open. I'm not discouraged at all...in fact, as I mentioned I'm learning a lot. (And re-learning stuff I'd forgotten!)

I might have to look into posting a WIP if I continue having problems, thanks for that suggestion.

Best,
   Bill B.

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## Morgan_R

Thanks Arsheesh! I think the blurry effect has two causes. First, I did an erosion pass to get my rivers - incise flow didn't work properly for me - and I think that may have given me a softer result. Second, I painted the masks for my different color layers with a soft brush. Next time I'd use something with some texture. Definitely room for improvement, but at this point I'm happy to have something that isn't a complete eyesore.  :Very Happy:

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## arsheesh

Yup, every time I do a map in this style I learn something new myself, so there is always room for improvement.  It is definitely a respectable map though. 

Cheers,
-Arsheesh

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## Coppermane

arsheesh, I fell in love with your maps on Obsidian Portal and followed your links to this lovely site. Thanks for the breadcrumbs that led me here. I can only hope that eventually through all of these tutorials I will be able to come up with a map even half as good as yours.

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## arsheesh

Awe shucks, that's very nice of you to say Coppermane.  When I first came to the Guild I had absolutely zero experience working with digital software, and the tutorials here really helped me learn the ropes.  So if you spend some time practicing I have no doubt you'll be able to develop the skills to craft wonderful maps.  

Cheers,
-Arsheesh

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## Caenwyr

Well Arsheesh, I must say this is an amazing tutorial. It took me quite a while to master it, and it sure isn't the fastest way to draw mountains, but the result is far, far, _far_ better than before I learned your technique. I'll create a seperate thread about my map in the near future, but I'll give you a quick peek at the semi-final result already. Let me know what you think about it! 


_A larger version of the image can be found here._

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## arsheesh

Hi Caenwyr, I'm glad to here my tutorial was helpful to you.  I like the colors of your map, they really blend together nicely.  I wonder if the mountains might be a little washed out with all that white, but then if you really want to give the impression of alpine glaciers I can understand the decision to allow so much white.  Overall this looks really nice.

Cheers,
-Arsheesh

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## daeVArt

wow, Just curious, is there any Photo shop translation on this tutorial? i really like the color theme... really suite the color that i really wanted for my World wide map. well, better learn GIMP then ^^... will upload the result when I start make the map  :Smile:

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## Korash

@ daeVArt, if you are comfortable with PS I would suggest trying the tut out in PS instead of trying to learn Gimp. Most of the techniques are simular in both programs and all it realy takes is learning what the commands used in one are called in the other. Make notes as you go through the trial and error and you should start to understand what strengths and weeknesses each may have. And learn the workarounds for your prog. Which is helpful because there are LOTS of tuts for Gimp that can be used with PS and vis versa.

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## arsheesh

@ daeVArt - I haven't used PS and so did not do a conversion guide for PS for this tut.  However, Korash is right, most of the techniques discussed in this tutorial are also available in PS (in fact the gradient map is actually better in PS since PS offers a preview window that allows you to visually adjust the colors before applying them.  The only thing that might be different are the sort of cloud patterns used for the height map.  I'm not sure if PS will generate similar cloud patterns or not.  If you do try it out in PS I'd be curious to see how similar the result ends up being.

Cheers,
-Arsheesh

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## daeVArt

@korash... Ah right... I'll try to apply the technique with PS then ^^ 
@arsheesh okay, i'll make one with PS, will Upload the result soon  :Smile:

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## BISHDP

First off, Thank you for such a good tutorial.  I am running into one problem though.  My mountains look very weak and low.  I seem to be unable to get the degree of peaks that you show.  Is there a trick to this or some advice you could give me to improve the quality of my mountains?

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## arsheesh

Hi BISHDP if you have an image of what you are talking about I'd be happy to look it over and make suggestions for you.  Unfortunately I probably won't be able to do so until early next week (Monday or thereabouts) as I will be giving a paper at a conference this weekend and need to keep focused on preparing for it.  But post up an image and I'll reply as soon as I can.

Cheers,
-Arsheesh

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## BISHDP

Here is my first map that I did with your tutorial.  I think it looks decent but the mountains don't look as high as I would like.

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## arsheesh

Hi there BISHDP, I had a quick look at the image you posted here as well as the ones you posted at your WIP thread and I do have a few tips that might help:

First about the mountains.  The contrast in your height map looks about right so I'm inclined to think that perhaps there is a missing step somewhere.  Did you include both the "Mountain Bumps" layer (on page 7 of the tutorial)?  If not, adding this layer may help to make your mountains pop out a bit.  If you have added the layer, you can always increase the opacity (which should be set to 50%) and/or duplicate this layer.  

Second, about the height map.  If you would like a more gradual elevation from lowlands to mountain peeks, you may want do a bit more sculpting with your height map (see page 2 of the tutorial).  I've attached a larger image of what one of my height maps generally looks like once I'm finished airbrushing (BTW, this is one the most time consuming elements of the process and usually takes me several hours).

Third, I noticed that your final colored map looks somewhat grainy.  This might be due to setting the Noise % in Wilbur too high.  If you like the grainyness, well and good.  If you want a smoother map though you may need to play around with reducing the noise settings in Wilbur.  Hope that helps.

Cheers,
-Arsheesh

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## BISHDP

First off, thank you very much for you help.

I will have to try that.  This map was more just a proof of concept but the one I am currently working will see the benefit of your advice.  More blending and extra Mountain Bumps.  Got it.  Thank you again.

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## kaelin

This is really a great tutorial. It is well-written and fabulously presented. It is the first tutorial I've followed beginning to end and to be honest, I've learned a lot about using GIMP with this tutorial. To be fair, I'd never used GIMP prior to this tutorial. I was admittedly daunted when I saw it described as intermediate, but the tutorial is written in such a way as to walk me through each step of the process. I've not done anything that I'm brave enough to post here yet, but as I work through it more and more, I will have to post something, I suppose.  :Smile:

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## kaelin

This is the result of my working through the tutorial completely. My mountains seem to have gone awry somewhere along the way and the beginnings of some of the rivers need cleaning up. This is a land area roughly twice the size of Europe. All in all, it was a thoroughly enjoyable project and a lot of fun. I'll go back and rework my way through it, having a better understanding of both the steps and GIMP.

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## arsheesh

Thanks for the kind words Kaelin, I'm glad that the tutorial was helpful to you, and you've done great considering that you are new to GIMP and this was your first crack at digital cartography.  About the mountains: it looks like you are missing the bump map layer, or else that the wrong layer got bump mapped.  In the "Filters" menu when you select "Bump Map" (for the Land Bumps and Mountain Bumps layers), you need to be sure to select the appropriate layer from the drop down menu (labeled "Bump Map") at the top of the Bump Map window (see below), otherwise the filter will default to bump mapping the top layer in your layers stack.

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## kaelin

Thank you, sir! I appreciate the quick response and will go back and make sure I do it correctly.
I was very inspired by the Eriond map and thought it would really bring life to my game world. I'm using a test map for the learning process. Again, I aprpeciate both the quick response and correction and the tutorial itself! I'd rep again, but it seems I have to spread it around some.  :Smile:

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## kaelin

So I went back and applied the proper mask to the proper channel and also noticed that I had not changed the ppi (still at 72). I'm going to try it again but use a lower noise setting as the land bumps look more like a skin disease, otherwise, a few adjustments later and...

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## arsheesh

Sorry for the delayed response, I've been on holiday for the past several days.  Thanks for the kind words and I hope you are satisfied with the end result.  Let me know if you have any other questions.

Cheers,
-Arsheesh

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## Naeddyr

A++++++ Would Download Again

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## arsheesh

Thanks Naeddyr!

Cheers,
-Arsheesh

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## okami

This is an amazing tutorial. I love it. I'm about halfway through and just have a quick question. Why do you need two different layers for placing mountains? (Mountains 1 and Mountains 2) It's just a bit confusing for me, is all. Also, I may just be missing something, but is there something specific I need to do in order to keep the pieces of mountains I've cut out inside my land area?

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## arsheesh

Thanks so much Okami!  In response to the first part of your question, the reason why you need two layers for the mountains is that at a later stage you will be erasing (fading) the hard edges of the mountain pieces so that they blend in together to make a seamless whole.  If you had placed all of the mountain pieces on the same layer, then you could not do this; any attempt to erase (at low opacity) some portion of the mountains would erase all of it.  As to the second part of your question, well, you could always add a land mask to the mountain layers, that ought to do it.

Cheers,
-Arsheesh

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## okami

Awesome! Thanks for answering so quickly.  :Very Happy:

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## David3

_thanks, arsheesh 
great tutorial_

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## arsheesh

> _thanks, arsheesh 
> great tutorial_


My pleasure, glad it is of use to you!

Cheers,
-Arsheesh

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## zukeprime

Really awesome tutorial Arsheesh...though I have to admit I was pulling my hair out with Wilbur, mostly trying to get rivers where I want them.  Just wanted to show what I was able to do.  First, I started with a CC3 map I made for some folks on G+ just for kicks.  I wanted to replicate this map, but give it a more realistic feel.

Obviously, you can tell its a CC3 map a mile away.

Using your tutorial, this was what I was able to do:


I'm really impressed with the results.  Obviously, I'm still not done.  For example, I'm going to have to manually add some rivers in the dark "blob-ish" swamp area in the south.  The trouble I was having with Wilbur is that it wasn't making good rivers...it kept making these terribly short "wisps".  My solution was to go back to Gimp and tone down the Land Clouds layer (reducing contrast) and doing a little more sculpting on the areas I wanted to force rivers.  The only place it really didn't work was in the south swamp area, and the southeast peninsula where you can see a bit of a rut moving nw to se.   Also, I probably should have spent more time beefing up my mountains, they look a little sparse and thin.

Anyway, I wanted to personally thank you for taking the time to make such an incredibly detailed tutorial.  Any chance we can get your techniques on labeling?  LOL, that's my next step.

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## arsheesh

> Really awesome tutorial Arsheesh...though I have to admit I was pulling my hair out with Wilbur, mostly trying to get rivers where I want them...  The trouble I was having with Wilbur is that it wasn't making good rivers...it kept making these terribly short "wisps".  My solution was to go back to Gimp and tone down the Land Clouds layer (reducing contrast) and doing a little more sculpting on the areas I wanted to force rivers.  The only place it really didn't work was in the south swamp area, and the southeast peninsula where you can see a bit of a rut moving nw to se.
> 
> Anyway, I wanted to personally thank you for taking the time to make such an incredibly detailed tutorial.  Any chance we can get your techniques on labeling?  LOL, that's my next step.


Yeah getting rivers to correspond to a previously existing map is one of the trickiest things to do when using Wilbur.  The method you described is pretty much how I handle it, but it can be very time consuming.  I'm really glad that the tutorial was helpful to you, your results turned out very nicely (great work!).  As to labels, it seems to me that someone here once wrote up a walk-through on this, but darned if I can find it.  However I think RobA has in in one or two of his tutorials discussed how to place text on a path (to make curved text) in GIMP and in Inkscape.  I've thought about creating a sort of basic 101 level "how to" that describes things such as this and how to create icons and such.  However sadly my plate is full at the moment and I don't think I'll be able to do pursue this for some time.  

Cheers,
-Arsheesh

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## zukeprime

Arsheesh, I'm trying to develop a specific technique for making cliffs using your method.  I think it's working ok, but wanted to see if you've got a better technique.  First my starting experimental picture.


Just a succession of gray colors in the general shape of a cliff, with a difference cloud layer mixed in.  

Import into wilbur and run noise, fill, and precipiton results in this


Ignore the scraggly edges...just playing around.  I think it looks ok, but the hard drop off causes weird color anomalies in the gradient map, i.e. the hard green line.    I think I can utilize this for my mapping project, but wanted to ping you or anyone else on a different or better technique?

Oh...forgot to add, I used both the BUMP layer and an added emboss layer, both set to overlay.  Played around with the transparencies until I got the "pop" I wanted.  Merged them together when I was happy with it.  On hindsight I think its perhaps a little too harsh.

I think I can implement this into your tutorial flow during the blending phase.  Instead of blending directly onto the LAND BUMPS layer, use a transparent layer on top to do the blending.  Then, you can cut a 'hard edge' on your cliff area, with a distinct light (top of cliff) and dark (bottom of cliff) transition.  I'll see if it works.

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## arsheesh

> Arsheesh, I'm trying to develop a specific technique for making cliffs using your method.  I think it's working ok, but wanted to see if you've got a better technique...  I think I can utilize this for my mapping project, but wanted to ping you or anyone else on a different or better technique?
> 
> I think I can implement this into your tutorial flow during the blending phase.  Instead of blending directly onto the LAND BUMPS layer, use a transparent layer on top to do the blending.  Then, you can cut a 'hard edge' on your cliff area, with a distinct light (top of cliff) and dark (bottom of cliff) transition.  I'll see if it works.


I recently had to make a plateau in one of my maps and I used a method almost exactly similar to the one you've employed here.  Just added an additional layer, rendered fractal clouds in it, used the curves function (under "Colors") to lighten the clouds, isolated the boundary areas of the plateau and deleted the rest, and then blended the edges of the plateau a bit.  So yes, I think you are on the right track here.  Be curious to see an update of this.

Cheers,
-Arsheesh

----------


## zukeprime

Thanks Arsheesh.  I'm still trying to figure this out.  I've redone the map about 2-3 times, trying to get it just right in Wilbur. Here's the latest iteration:


No matter how hard I try, the swamp lands in the south start looking too hand drawn.  Oh well...

My mind is blown at the moment...I think I'm just going to go with it, and start putting in the towns, etc.

----------


## arsheesh

Well perhaps the swamp-lands look a bit hand-drawn but I don't take that to be a problem.  I think the map is really coming along nicely.  You are doing great work.

Cheers,
-Arsheesh

----------


## waldronate

The critical part of getting rivers where you want them with Wilbur is to have a mask with the rivers baked into it. Starting with your initial CC3 map, I made a few masks:


Coast


Coast with waterways


Hills


Mountains

The basic process was:
1) Load Coast as select, add 100 to altitude, then add a mound 50 high.
2) Load coast with waterways and  add 100 to altitude.
3) Repeat for Hills and mountains.
4) Reload Coast as a selection to bound the erosion effects.
5) Now add noise with a value of about 25.
6) Fill basins and incise flow.
7) Now 25ish rounds of precipiton erosion to smooth things out.
A few more rounds of steps from 2 through 7 (you may want to adjust the maximum values to get slightly different effects).


Result

----------


## arsheesh

Huh!  I've never considered doing it that way before.  I've got to try this now.  Thanks for the walk-through Waldronate.

Cheers,
-Arsheesh

----------


## zukeprime

Thanks Waldronate.  As you posted this, I was working through the Fun with Wilbur Volume 1 tutorial.  I used a river mask on the previous post, but I didn't raise the mountain terrain, other than what I had already done in the GIMP height map.  Let me play around with it.

----------


## zukeprime

ok...I think I'm getting somewhere.  I really overdid the rivers on this one.  Please don't laugh...and ignore the colors!  It's really late and my eyes are busting out.  Ha!

Base Image


River Mask


Hill Mask


Mtn Mask


Final Product


The only problem I see using such large noise and precipiton iterations is that I lost a lot of depth to the non-mountainous terrain.  The rivers, however, come out really nice.  Obviously, I turned it up to ELEVEN on the rivers, but I wanted to see what happened.  Also, my choice of brush pattern (Acrylic 2) for the hill mask leaves an obvious mark.  

Thanks for the help...I think I've got some good info to work with now.

----------


## waldronate

One thing that the Eriond tutorial does is to incise flow to run rivers. You can also use Wilbur's Texture>>Other Maps>>River Flow tool to create a river map that you can drop on top of the terrain without having to carve the deep canyons all the way down to sea level. Learning the correct settings will take a bit of practice because the tool's effects vary a bit with the resolution of the image. More precipiton erosion will reduce the hard edges from the masks.

----------


## zukeprime

Yeah...one of the things I'm struggling with in this process is exporting a decent river map that I can use in GIMP as a mask.  Exporting the height map is great, but the GIMP color picker tool at a threshold of 15 only gets the major low-lying rivers and ignores the higher rivers/glacial flows in the mountains.  If I color pick those, I end up with half the mountain selected just based on the color delta.  

Anyhoo, I tried using the River Map option in Wilbur, but I end up with thousands of  little rivers.  It still doesn't seem to work even after a healthy dose of erosion, noise, and fill basins.  For example, right before my normal 'incise flow' I'll try to generate a river map, it fails to produce the rivers as expected.  When I immediately go to incise flow, I get those nice rivers.  Obviously I'm missing something.  Let me correct myself, I actually did get a nice river pattern once, but it was extremely faint (1px?) and I can't reproduce that result.  

BTW, waldronate: I really do appreciate your help.  I thoroughly enjoy using Wilbur to produce realistic terrain, and combined with arsheesh's tutorial it really is fun.  I'm also an FT3/CC3 customer, so thanks for helping dev so many great tools.

----------


## waldronate

If you're getting lots of little river segments, it's because the river networks aren't connected. Try loading the coast mask and do a couple of basin fills before doing the find rivers. For some reason, basin fills don't seem to be generating a fully-connected network at the moment, but I'm not sure if it's a problem in my development version or the public one (I haven't looked at it in a while). 

Fun with Wilbur, Volume 5 describes a way to get the basins looking like basins with a connected river network flowing through it. An important point of this tutorial is that once you get the terrain looking broadly the way you want it, you can generate rivers from a slightly different terrain and still overlay it on top of the main terrain and get plausible results.

The only part of CC3 that I worked on is a few effects. I'm just an independent contractor for some small things at ProFantasy.

----------


## zukeprime

I think I've got a good flow worked out, based on Arsheesh's tutorial and the procedure you outlined above.  There were a few major items I was struggling with.  1) Precipiton erosion was carving huge cliffs on the coasts, 2) Incise flow/precipiton made very nice river drainage patterns, but too strongly for what I was  trying to accomplish, 3) Trying to balance sufficient mountain erosion to make it look real, while at the same time minimizing massive erosion of my flatter areas.

I've precipiton'd about a thousand times lol!  This is what I've done.  First I used a completely blank canvas and selection areas as given by Waldronate...no use of noise backgrounds whatsoever.  The mountain and hill masks are the same from my previous post.  I changed the river mask to include only the rivers, no coastlines and inverted the colors.  So, instead of adding 100 feet to the coast/river selection between each iteration, I actually subtracted 100 feet from only the rivers/lakes.  Why?  Well this prevented a continual build up of the coastlines and allowed a smoother 'beach' area in selected zones. 

Also, I noticed my mountains weren't really eroding into mountain shapes, so I stopped adding to the mountain layer after the first pass.  Instead I added to the hill selection which effectively raised the hills and mountain areas (my hill selection covers mountains and hills).  If I started over on a new map, I'll probably make significant changes to the hill/mountain pattern...using a new brush pattern, separating the hills and mountains, etc.

The results are subtly different, but I'm pleased with it tbh.  The river erosion areas are still slightly too prominent, but that's mostly a function of the color selection of the gradient fill.  I'm currently trying to develop a smoother blend to even out the erosion areas.  Also, this is still a WIP, so the picture you see is where I stopped after trying to add some beaches on the coast.  I also haven't edited in my lakes, so the straight line anomalies you see in the river erosion are where lakes are supposed to go.

----------


## zukeprime

This is just the temperate layer, which I think shows the erosion in the mountains a little better.

----------


## arsheesh

Looking really nice zukeprime.  With each new iteration there have been subtle changes that have improved the overall map.  

Cheers,
-Arsheesh

----------


## yokai

Excellent work.

----------


## Coriolis

Arsheesh,

Is it possible to predetermine the locations of some of the rivers with WILBUR, or do the river flow patterns and locations have to be determined by the minor elevation noise?

Could you, for instance, draw in a river as a long, winding skinny bit of ocean going into the land?

----------


## arsheesh

Unfortunately no, not with my method at least.  You can try to approximate river placement via elevation, but there is no precision here.  On the other hand two pages back Waldronate describes a method for getting the rivers where you want them that I have yet to try.  Might be worth checking out.

Cheers,
-Arsheesh

----------


## Coriolis

Perhaps I could try airbrushing and smudging the lower elevations to match the required course of a river. I'll give it a shot.

----------


## Coriolis

Success!

The darkened river valleys shoe-horned WILBUR's rivers nicely. I probably could have done it with a narrower river valley, but it worked.

----------


## arsheesh

Glad to here this worked for you Coriolis.  Looking great so far.

Cheers,
-Arsheesh

----------


## ukie

Great Tutorial. I hope you will consider making a video because the final result was not as refined as example  :Frown:

----------


## arsheesh

Thanks ukie.  Sorry to here that.  I hadn't considered doing a video.  If I had the time I'd look into it but unfortunately these days my dissertation keeps me pretty busy.

----------


## ukie

Too bad  :Frown:  I hope you don't mind me bugging you. Good luck on dissertation. How much time are they giving you to write it? they gave me 8 years all together although hopefully I will finish it in 3  :Smile:

----------


## arsheesh

No bother at all ukie, wish I could oblige.  My hope is to be done in 3 and a half, but it may go as long as 4.  We'll see.  Best wishes on your own dissertation btw.

Cheers,
-Arsheesh

----------


## ukie

Good luck to you too  :Smile:

----------


## Thorf

There are elements I really like in all of your maps in this thread, zukeprime.  If I might make a suggestion, why don't you layer all the images and then use masks to blend the most interesting parts of each attempt at the map?  You'll end up with a map with lots of great variety, as well as doing what you want it to do.  Of course it will require some fiddling to get the heights to line up properly, but I think you could make a really nice map that way.

I have a question for you about this stage of your map:




> Base Image
> Attachment 54268
> 
> Final Product
> Attachment 54271


The rocky hills in this map are really cool!  I can't quite work out how they came about from the base image - can you remember what kind of processing you did to them to make them come out this way?  Also, if you still have the height map for the final product at this stage, I'd love to see it too.

----------


## Jae Dub 003

This is an incredible tutorial.  I been following it closely & asking lots of questions.  But now at that end.  I am stumped at the land noise portion.  I can get the first part of noise done.  But somehow, after I complete that process, I am no longer able to "replace selection with this channel" after I 15% blur.  Not sure if I am in the channel, or layer.  But I am pretty sure I am following the tutorial right.   Anyone else have suggestions?

----------


## schattentanz

Hi  :Smile: 

First of all: Thanks for this tutorial - basically THIS is exactly, what I've been looking for my whole (digital mapmaking) life  :Smile: 

Right now, I'm stuck, though, in the Wilbur part, when it comes to creating rivers.

For a better understanding, I have attached the result, Wilbur produces:
Where the red lines are, I would have loved to see some rivers - instead the coastline gets "fractured" (sort of) and some (2, last time I counted) rivers appear in the ocean area ..

Now I'm wondering: What am I doing wrong / how do I do this right?



Thanks and kind regards,
Kai  :Smile:

----------


## arsheesh

Hi schattentanz, I'm glad to here the tutorial is of use to you.  About the coastlines, do you mean that you get lots of little rivers and grooves carved into the shore?  If so that's  a normal part of the Precipiton erosion process.  If you'd rather not have them in your map just skip this particular step.  However just so you are aware, one of the advantages of using the precipiton erosion filter is that it helps to gently erode hard edges, so if there are any edge-bits of mountain clouds on your map which, despite your best efforts at blending, still stick out, the precipiton erosion filter will help to erode them a bit.  As to getting rivers in the ocean, that is completely normal.  Don't worry about it because later on in the tutorial I explain how to get rid of these.  On the other hand if you aren't getting rivers in the areas you indicated then there is a problem, because the incise flow erosion filter is supposed place rivers in those lower elevation points.  Just to clarify then, you have run the Incise Flow filter and still aren't getting rivers there?

Cheers,
-Arsheesh

----------


## schattentanz

Hi arsheesh  :Smile: 
thanks for taking the time to reply and to explain  :Smile: 

Yes, I did run the Incise Flow filter. I do not worry about those "rivers in the oceans" - ist rather the lack of rivers on the continents worrying me ..
As you might see from the attached image, I created riverbeds by coloring the landscapes accordingly dark .. do I need to correct this?



Thanks and Kind regards,
Kai

----------


## Thorf

I don't know if this will help you, but it's worth a try.

I have found that Wilbur's rivers require basins to be completely filled in order to produce something that you might reasonably expect rivers to look like.  Without filled basins, and especially if you are using incise flow, there will be little pits everywhere that suck in your rivers before they have a chance to get to any length at all.  I would suggest that you try doing a fill basins command, and then try again.  Note that if you are getting large basins, you may also need to add some noise - but I have found that this in itself messes up rivers, so usually I do: fill basins, percentage noise 1%, fill basins again.

----------


## arsheesh

> Hi arsheesh 
> thanks for taking the time to reply and to explain 
> 
> Yes, I did run the Incise Flow filter. I do not worry about those "rivers in the oceans" - ist rather the lack of rivers on the continents worrying me ..
> As you might see from the attached image, I created riverbeds by coloring the landscapes accordingly dark .. do I need to correct this?
> 
> 
> 
> Thanks and Kind regards,
> Kai


Ah, I see, I wasn't sure if you had run the incise filter yet.  OK, well as Thorf has pointed out, you do need to run a fill basins operation just prior to running incise flow.  Like Thorf I then add percentage noise (though I typically use 4-5%) and then fill basins again prior to the incise flow.  Have you tried doing this?

Cheers,
-Arsheesh

----------


## schattentanz

Yes, I've tried it .. The issue with flattend out basins appears to be: rivers run in straight lines through them ..
I helped myself now by drawing the rivers manually on a separate layer, selecting the negative of the land mass and adding the selection of the rivers to the negative selection. Then I inverted everything and saved it to a channel - tadaa: Rivers Mask  :Smile: 

Yet, some questions remain:

Regarding the Mountain Bump Layer:
You say, without it, the mountains would look diminished. I've got an issue with the whole layer (and I guess I'm doing something wrong there, again):
When I use  this layer, I get a white hue mountain top on each and every mountain. Since I've got mountains in a desert, snow would just not look credible there ..
So: What am I doing wrong there?

Regarding the Arctic:
You say, after duplicating Arctic 2, you need to apply the Mt Mask. When I apply the Mt Mask, though, upon further duplicating the layer, it won't brighten up the snowy parts anymore, leaving me with a very violet arctic .. I helped myself there by just not applying the Mt Mask - served my purpose .. Yet, I wonder, whether I misinterpreted anything there, too?

Btw.: I just want to stress out once more how incredibly awesome your tutorial is, since it tought me A LOT about the features of Gimp, showing me, what a damn powerful tool Gimp is  :Smile: 
Thank you so much for putting it online  :Smile: 



Kind regards,
Kai

----------


## Thorf

> Yes, I've tried it .. The issue with flattend out basins appears to be: rivers run in straight lines through them ..


That's where the percentage noise comes in...  Adding noise prevents the rivers from running in straight lines, instead making them move in nice random paths through any flat areas.  The fill basins you apply after adding noise does not (usually) get rid of the noise fully, so the three action fill basins/percentage noise/fill basins thing should work to randomise your river paths with incise flow.

----------


## arsheesh

> Yes, I've tried it .. The issue with flattend out basins appears to be: rivers run in straight lines through them ..
> I helped myself now by drawing the rivers manually on a separate layer, selecting the negative of the land mass and adding the selection of the rivers to the negative selection. Then I inverted everything and saved it to a channel - tadaa: Rivers Mask 
> 
> Yet, some questions remain:
> 
> Regarding the Mountain Bump Layer:
> You say, without it, the mountains would look diminished. I've got an issue with the whole layer (and I guess I'm doing something wrong there, again):
> When I use  this layer, I get a white hue mountain top on each and every mountain. Since I've got mountains in a desert, snow would just not look credible there ..
> So: What am I doing wrong there?
> ...


Regarding the issue with having straight rivers, I concur with Thorf's assessment.  But it sounds like you've found another workaround.  Moving on to Mountain Bump Map layer, the issue you describe may not be due to any mistake on your part; it's just a function of the how the colors have been set on your gradients.  One way to resolve this issue is to simply modify a few of the settings on your dessert gradients so that there is less snow (or no snow) on the desert mountains.  To do this open up each of your desert gradient dialogues and adjust the control sliders at the bottom right to reduce the white segment (see image below).  Next create a new gradient map of the deserts using these revised gradients and then just follow the steps in the "Defining the Climate Zones" section for blending these in with your other climate zones.

Regarding the question about the arctic layer, I think I might have made a mistake here (I will have to go back and check), but what you want to do on the Arctic 3 layer is mask only the mountains so that the Artic 3 layer only affects the rest of the land (otherwise the mountains would just become too washed out).  In order to do this you _do_ add the Mt Mask to this layer, but you have to tick the box that says "Invert", otherwise the mask will mask out the land rather than the mountains.  

Oh, and thanks, I'm really glad to here the tutorial has been helpful.

Cheers,
-Arsheesh

----------


## schattentanz

Hmmm .. even though I completely removed the "snow" from the desert gradients, applying the mountain bump layer still created snow in the desert mountains ..
I helped myself out by blackening out the according parts in the layer mask and by adding/using another "color variant" layer, working the same as in your forest tutorial  :Smile: 

Regarding the arctic, I think I basically did, what you described in your last posting, then I just removed a little bit from the layer mask to "bleach out" the grass land intended to become a tundra .. For the pole caps I used a blue/white layer  :Smile: 

Since you've been incredibly helpful with replying as well as (and even more so) with your tutorial(s) showing the possibilities of Gimp, I've been able to create a wonderful looking map (see attached) of which I'm actually very proud (it's a fantasy map, so screw any geographical logic  :Laughing:  ).

Attachment 58550

Now going onwards to details, such as kingdoms' borders, capitals, decorations and stuff  :Smile: 



Thanks again for your outstanding support and kind regards,
Kai  :Smile:

----------


## arsheesh

Glad to help schattentanz!  Hmm, for some reason I'm getting an error message when I attempt to view the attachment.  I'd love to see what you've come up with though.  

Cheers,
-Arsheesh

----------


## schattentanz

Hu?

That's odd .. in the preview it still worked ..

Alright, let's have another go:



Hopefully it will work this time ..



Kind regards,
Kai  :Smile:

----------


## arsheesh

That turned out very well schattentanz.  Great work!

Cheers,
-Arsheesh

----------


## Korash

Well I finally got around to (sort of) follow this tut...and you can see the results below. I did make a few changes: Started with SRTM data and dove into the tut at the Wilbur part. I also found doing the Incise Flow that the Flow Exponent of 6.5 did nothing noticeable, but 0.65 did as shown in the tut. Not sure if it was a typo or due to the size of the work (5072x2720), but I did notice that the lower the exponent the more visible the effect. Anyhoot, The land mass is done, and now I have to populate it  :Smile: 

Thanks Arsheesh for the tut and also for just maybe getting my but back behind the DM screen. Following this tut got this old noggin thinking about running stuff again.

BTW, Koodos to anyone who can figure out where this is located on good ol' Earth

----------


## Jae Dub 003

Wow!  The rivers look beautiful there Korash.

I have taken a long break to think on some things... mainly how I can get better land noise & make my oceans beautiful... the technique I tried at the end of the tutorial didn't produce the great waters I hoped for.

----------


## arsheesh

> Well I finally got around to (sort of) follow this tut...and you can see the results below. I did make a few changes: Started with SRTM data and dove into the tut at the Wilbur part. I also found doing the Incise Flow that the Flow Exponent of 6.5 did nothing noticeable, but 0.65 did as shown in the tut. Not sure if it was a typo or due to the size of the work (5072x2720), but I did notice that the lower the exponent the more visible the effect. Anyhoot, The land mass is done, and now I have to populate it 
> 
> Thanks Arsheesh for the tut and also for just maybe getting my but back behind the DM screen. Following this tut got this old noggin thinking about running stuff again.
> 
> BTW, Koodos to anyone who can figure out where this is located on good ol' Earth


Hey sorry for the late reply, somehow I missed this.  I've seen a few people who have begun with SRTM data and it's always turned out really well.  I'm going to have to give this a try at some point.

Cheers,
-Arsheesh

----------


## waldronate

> BTW, Koodos to anyone who can figure out where this is located on good ol' Earth


Using a high-latitude location like the Falkland islands really points out the importance of using a good projection. Those islands are really stretched horizontally (a factor of about 1.6, if I've done 1/cos(51.75) correctly) in the Plate Caree projection.

----------


## Jae Dub 003

Soon as I have the ability to upload images, I will share my land I managed to complete with much struggle & following Arsheesh's tutorial!

----------


## arsheesh

Look forward to seeing it Jae Dub.

Cheers,
-Arsheesh

----------


## Korash

> Using a high-latitude location like the Falkland islands really points out the importance of using a good projection. Those islands are really stretched horizontally (a factor of about 1.6, if I've done 1/cos(51.75) correctly) in the Plate Caree projection.


And Kudos to waldronate !!  :Smile:  Yeah they were stretched out a few times while I was tooling around with the height field to make them suit what I want to see....still not sure it looks right but am willing to let it stand where it is.

Thanks Jae, it was some work to get them deep enough looking (not sure why though), but I like them too.

Arsheesh, try looking for a tut for FW Tools. It was the one that I used to get the basic height field waaaay back when.

----------


## Terokai

Here is the map i spent pretty much all afternoon/evening on yesterday. Just want to say great tutorial and i am really pleased with how this turned out. The only thing i could not get was the last bit with the river mask and the selecting from channel to make the water.

----------


## waldronate

Not long after (and in response to, if I recall) this tutorial was originally published, Wilbur sprouted a river computation function (Texture>>Other Maps>>River Flow). This feature can make river finding much simpler, especially on terrains that have already been processed in Wilbur.

----------


## MarkusTay

First, thank you Arsheesh for creating this tutorial, and thank you Waldronite and everyone else who contributed useful info in the thread.

Where can I grab the latest version of Wilbur? I am following this tutorial and I just got up to that point.

----------


## arsheesh

Hi Markus, you can find the latest version (correct me if I'm wrong Waldronate) here.

Cheers,
-Arsheesh

----------


## MarkusTay

Okay, I'll try downloading it from there - thanks for the quick response.

I downloaded it from somewhere else, and after I installed it, I can't find it.  :Question: 


*EDIT:* LOL - nvmd, found it. My search function couldn't find it, so I had to look through my C drive the old-fashioned way. Weird.

Thanks again Arsheesh, for everything.

----------


## waldronate

I keep meaning to fix the installer to put a shortcut somewhere useful. Probably won't happen until the next version of Wilbur comes out, which won't be for a while yet...

----------


## MarkusTay

Okay, I get up to the part where I load it in Wilbur, and everything looks pretty good. I do the first few steps, and then when I get to the 'Fill Basin' part it just turns everything a sickly greenish-yellow. I've tried playing with the settings, and have even tried running the fill basin without doing the other stuff first, and all it does is slightly change the sickly color it changes everything to (everything except the peaks of the mountains).

Any ideas? I would have included some screenshots, but when I try to save the file in Wilbur all I get is my original Height Map from GIMP. Why aren't the changes applying to the save?

I can't believe I got this far and am stuck. I have a feeling it has something to do with the setting (map) itself  - the world is a flat disc, so it has a ring of mountains around it, rather then ocean (but there still is lots of ocean, its just inside that mountain-barrier).

----------


## Korash

What are your settings that you are using for your fills and flows? For the flows try to go large just see if you get different results. Like Arsheesh mentions near the beginning of the tuts, picture scale can have a marked difference on your settings at various points.

Sent from my GT-S5830D using Tapatalk 2

----------


## MarkusTay

Thanks for the quick response.

I did shrink my map from 6600 px to 2200 px - just a shade (100) larger then the file in the tutorial, so I didn't think that would make much difference. All other settings I left at their presets, unless otherwise noted in the tutorial.

I notice that when I do the first step (in Wilbur), changing the map height in the mathematical setting to be between 500-3500, the water goes from blue to green, and starts looking like it is merging with the land. However, I did try to proceed without doing that step, and still get the same bad results when I try to fill the basins. Everything but the very tops of the mountains merge into a greenish-yellow flat color. I get the feeling it isn't detecting the coasts somehow. 

I'm still thinking that it has something to do with the ring of land around the perimeter that is throwing something off in Wilbur. Everything up until that point worked just fine.

----------


## waldronate

The process typically includes a "fill basins" step. This step fills basins. If you have a ring of land, it's making a basin. I'm not sure that there's much you can do with that process, unfortunately. Selecting an area to be processed does the full normal fill basins and then blends the old and new surface according to the selection, which will leave a steep cliff in the area. I should probably modify the processing on fill basins to allow for a true selection that will treat unselected areas as sinks and so allow for interior basins with a careful selection.

A nasty workaround is to duplicate your height map and cut a channel on one side of the ring in one of the maps and on the other side in the other map. Then process the two maps and blend them with an image editing tool. An ugly solution, but possibly workable.

----------


## MarkusTay

Okay, now that you've just explained to me whats happening mechanically, I think I can work around it. 

The ring of land/mountains around the perimeter I actually got to come out okay after tweaking some settings, but the central sea (that Wilbur is seeing as a 'basin') and continents keeps getting filed in. I can pull the center mass out of the map and do it separately, and then blend them as you suggested. There is one isthmus that connects one of the continents to the outer ring, but I'll just have to fudge that somehow.

Thanks for your input - I think I picked the wrong world to use this tutorial on, but I'll keep at it.   :Smile:

----------


## MarkusTay

Well, chopping the middle of the map worked very well (I assume), and I will now treat it as two separate maps and add them back together - great suggestion.

Only problem I am having now is that when I go to add rivers, it only adds them to the ocean. Everything else looks like it worked fine (compared to the tutorial's illustrations), and yet, it decided to put the rivers in the ocean instead. Anyway to adjust something to make them find the land?

I have a feeling almost all my problems may have been from a very early mistake with the clouds layer, and now its catching up to me. Bear in mind I had to start with a map given to me, and not one that was randomly generated, so my clouds have no direct correlation to the terrain on the other layers. I tried to correct that as much as I could with the Airbrush (and got decent results), but its not as perfect as it would have been had everything been derived from the same initial clouds layer.

If there is no way of adjusting this better (to find the actual land LOL), then I may just go back to hand-drawing the rivers, which I don't think will be a big deal (or will it?)

*EDIT:* 
Okay, by lowering the mathematics (a LOT) and only doing one erosion pass, I can get the start of a few nice rivers, but they are all very short. The only ones that go all the way to the sea are ones where the mountains happen to be really close to the sea. Hopefully, by adding this part, you guys will be better-able to figure out whats going on here... I think I am on the right track. I feel I may have to tinker with the cloud layer a bit more - although I've found when I 'lower' the coastal areas too much (darken them), they tend to blur with the sea and I get my original problem back (where Wilbur can't differentiate between the low-lying regions and Ocean).

----------


## MarkusTay

So I got to the part where I apply the gradients and all I get is this awful mess that looks like a neon-green glow. I've tried backing-up a few steps (fortunately I've learned to save A LOT), but no dice. I finally decided to start from scratch again and went through the entire tutorial from beginning to end with a fine tooth-comb, double-checking each step, and I get the same exact ugly mess. For the very first time in my life I feel stupid, because I can't even figure-out what is going wrong. Even adjusting the gradient didn't help (just made it worse, actually). 

It was really hard just for me to get-through the Wilbur part, but I finally got decent results with that. However, I had to re-draw all my rivers by hand - the select-by-color option simply would not work (which was fine, because I had my own river layout planned, and just used the Wilbur one for inspiration). As I mentioned above, I had to tweak all the settings to get that part to work, which probably has something to do with why the later part isn't working. I have a feeling I am making some sort of very basic mistake here (perhaps going too dark with the mountain re-paint?)

Here is what I got after Wilbur -



And here is what I get after I apply the first gradient -



So any ideas of where I am going wrong? The corners don't matter at all - they will be blacked-out at the end, showing only the central circle with a small bit of land around the perimeter (its a flat discworld with a mountain-barrier).

Also, early in the tutorial (1st step really), you have us creating a land mask - at that point we have the land outline still active on our screen; are we supposed to hit 'Select All' before proceeding, or are we supposed to only be creating land-clouds within the land boundaries? From the illustrations, it looks as if the entire canvas should be covered with clouds. I've tried it both ways, and I am pretty-sure it makes no difference (in fact, it might even save a step later), but I just want to make sure I am following the tutorial PRECISELY the way you meant it to be.

Thanks in-advance for any advice you guys might offer - I'm at wits end.

----------


## Falconius

In the gradients you apply you have to adjust all the transitions (the little arrows) until the gradient looks right.  The way I did it was to have the gradient editor open with the greyscale hight map to be changed then applied the gradient map, if it didn't look right I undid the colouring action, adjusted the gradient arrows and then applied the gradient map again.  It takes a while but eventually it will look correct.

Also be sure to stick to the colour codes provided at first as they will come out looking good.

----------


## MarkusTay

Thanks for the quick response.

I tried playing with the gradients quite a bit last night - it only got worse. I'll try that again in a little while - right now I am picking back through the thread and seeing where others went astray to see if I can spot the problem. I have a feeling the bump-map isn't working at all (which I don't think is the whole problem, but combine that with the gradient issue and it might be). 

I seem to be having a problem figuring out which layers AND channels should be 'on' and 'off' at which steps.  :Confused:

----------


## Falconius

What I found was that I needed to have the white and lighter sections for the heights taking up much of the bar, at least half if not more, and that the lower altitude colours were rather small and had to be minutely adjusted.  For the picture you have though I think I'd extend the yellowish/brown area bigger taking a bit of white out and then lower the blue colour to just a sliver and start working from there.

----------


## waldronate

One thing that you might try is to look at a histogram of your altitudes, either in Wilbur (Window>>Histogram) or Photoshop. The number of altitudes at each altitude can offer a suggestion as to how many colors should be in that area (lots of samples near an altitude would need more corresponding colors in the gradient).

----------


## MarkusTay

Okay, Thanks.

I found a weird work-around, but it makes me think it IS a gradient issue - I added another layer on top of the Temperate layer; a white one and I set the opacity at 30%. Apparently, my map is just too damn dark. Its still far from perfect, but it looks a LOT better then it did.  I think my 'working style' is the opposite of Arsheesh's - I work from dark to light when blending, and I think when he blended his mountains, he worked from the mountains outward (so he went from light to dark). My blending seems to have worked fine, but my map is much darker (comparing mine at certain steps to his illustrations). Any way to lighten up just the darker bits without washing-out the whole thing? What if I fiddled with the bump-mapping numbers? Or should I just keep tweaking the gradient?

I also had problems when I took it into Wilbur, but resolved that by tweaking the settings (had to go with lower numbers for the mathematics part). Splitting the map worked-out just fine (because of the earlier issue I had with the center becoming one huge basin). I'll keep playing with it for now...

----------


## MarkusTay

On pg.10 of the tutorial, at the very bottom of the first column of text (after figure 26), you say "Add the Rivers Mask layer mask to the Arctic layer." In the next step you have us adding a black layer mask to the 2 desert layers *and the arctic layer*. You can't add a mask to a layer that already has a mask (at least, its not letting me do so with GIMP 2.8 ).

What am I supposed to do at this point?

Also, are we supposed to just leave all the channels 'on' all the time? They are not applied to anything unless associated with a layer, correct?

Thanks again.

*EDIT:* P.S. - It was gradient issue... plus a couple of other things (like my map being over-all too dark). I had to REALLY finagle the gradients to get them to work with the extremely dark palette, but I think it came out okay.

----------


## arsheesh

> On pg.10 of the tutorial, at the very bottom of the first column of text (after figure 26), you say "Add the Rivers Mask layer mask to the Arctic layer." In the next step you have us adding a black layer mask to the 2 desert layers *and the arctic layer*. You can't add a mask to a layer that already has a mask (at least, its not letting me do so with GIMP 2.8 ).
> 
> What am I supposed to do at this point?
> 
> Also, are we supposed to just leave all the channels 'on' all the time? They are not applied to anything unless associated with a layer, correct?
> 
> Thanks again.
> 
> *EDIT:* P.S. - It was gradient issue... plus a couple of other things (like my map being over-all too dark). I had to REALLY finagle the gradients to get them to work with the extremely dark palette, but I think it came out okay.


Hey sorry for not getting back to you on this Markus I just checked in on the tutorial here and saw that I had missed a string of your questions (thanks to everyone else out there who was much more helpful than I was).

As to your first question, that was an oversight on my part (I'll have to amend the tutorial).  You'll have to "apply" the layer mask on the arctic layer (and any other previous climate areas) before adding a new layer mask.

As to the channels, no, you'll want to hide these.  Keeping unhidden may be part of the reason your map is so dark.  The purpose of the channels is twofold, for use as layer maps and for use as a selection device.  Other than that they should remain hidden.  Anyway I'll be gone for much of the weekend but if you have any further questions I'll try to respond to them early next week.

Cheers,
-arsheesh

----------


## MarkusTay

Thanks for the quick response - that was a big help.  :Smile: 

Hopefully when I have something respectable I'll create my own thread. If nothing else, this has been one hell of a learning experience.

*Edit:* One more quick question, for whoever is good with GIMP - when I turn off the layer masks under the channels, does that turn them off in whatever layers I've attached them two, or did the program make a copy of them for that purpose?

Thanks again, everyone.

----------


## arsheesh

> Thanks for the quick response - that was a big help. 
> 
> Hopefully when I have something respectable I'll create my own thread. If nothing else, this has been one hell of a learning experience.
> 
> *Edit:* One more quick question, for whoever is good with GIMP - when I turn off the layer masks under the channels, does that turn them off in whatever layers I've attached them two, or did the program make a copy of them for that purpose?
> 
> Thanks again, everyone.


To answer your question, no, it does not.  The layer masks attached to each layer are not affected by whether any particular channel is on or not.

Cheers,
-Arsheesh

----------


## MarkusTay

Thanks for the answer. I got some really nice results, and once I obtain permission from the setting's owner (its a commission) I will start my own thread.  :Smile: 

One thing thing though that I had to work my way through - when creating the *Land Bumps* and *Mountain Bumps* layer I ran into problems, and after a few tries I realized your written instructions do not match the 'codified' text highlighted in pink (the order is different), which gives very different results. Once I simply followed the order in the highlighted text everything worked out fine.

----------


## JefBT

Another amazing tutorial, thank you!

I am dazzled with the fast and amazing results that I could achieve with this tutorial. My father also loved this technique. He like maps a lot, but he don't draw.


Here are the results:


"A ilha de Wilbur" = "The Isle of Wilbur". I named it that way in honor of this amazing software.

----------


## arsheesh

Very nice work on this one JefBT!  The oceans turned out very nicely as well.  Glad to here you found the tutorials useful.

Cheers,
-Arsheesh

----------


## JefBT

Thank you, Arsheesh. I'm having a lot of fun with this new software (and technique)

----------


## MarkusTay

Yes, I forgot to thank you as well. THANK YOU.  :Very Happy: 

Its still a WIP (because the setting is being tweaked as we go along), but you can see it here -




Its a flat world, BTW, a'la Discworld, which is why the map is surrounded by a ring of mountains.

----------


## arsheesh

Your welcome Markus  :Smile: .  That turned out nicely.  Wonderful job!

Cheers,
-Arsheesh

----------


## JefBT

Nice job, MarkusTay.

I always imagine a disc world surrounded by waterfalls to the "nothing", but mountains are very nice.

----------


## Zaelkonan

I found this website and tutorial a few weeks ago in an attempt get started at map-making. It took me a few tries to get decent results, but it's amazing how well the technique works once you get the hang of it. Thanks for the detailed tutorial, Arsheesh!

Here's what I ended up with. I went off script on a couple of things, including the rivers and ocean coloring. I'd like to have more detailed coastlines (comparable to those in MarkusTay's work in previous posts). If anyone has some advice on that, let me know.

----------


## oterrien

For french cartographers, I propose a translation into french of Arsheesh's tutorial. 

@Arsheesh, do you authorize me to publish such a tutorial. I took care to write it is inspired of your own even if some part are different. It is also a compilation of many methods I tried during my practice in order to generate a map as yours.

----------


## oterrien

The best method I've ever tried. Thanks to this, I succeeded in drawing the map I dreamt of.

----------


## JefBT

Very nice map, Zaelkonan, I just think the oceans are too bright (personal opinion), but the land is awesome.

Very good map too, oterrien, but contrasting with Zaelkonan, I think your seas are too dark (again, personal opinion), but it's awesome too.

Keep going.

----------


## arsheesh

> I found this website and tutorial a few weeks ago in an attempt get started at map-making. It took me a few tries to get decent results, but it's amazing how well the technique works once you get the hang of it. Thanks for the detailed tutorial, Arsheesh!
> 
> Here's what I ended up with. I went off script on a couple of things, including the rivers and ocean coloring. I'd like to have more detailed coastlines (comparable to those in MarkusTay's work in previous posts). If anyone has some advice on that, let me know.


That turned out nicely Zaelkonan!  For the coastline, assuming you are using the fractal clouds method, you can increase coastal detail by decreasing the size of the fractal clouds you are using.  There are also some tutorials floating around somewhere that discuss other methods for making more detailed coastlines, but you'll need to look for them.




> For french cartographers, I propose a translation into french of Arsheesh's tutorial. 
> 
> @Arsheesh, do you authorize me to publish such a tutorial. I took care to write it is inspired of your own even if some part are different. It is also a compilation of many methods I tried during my practice in order to generate a map as yours.


Very nice!  By all means, please feel free to translate the tutorial into French.  Oh and I don't mind if you want to make any modifications to it either - you just may want to let others know that they are your modifications to avoid confusion and to give yourself credit for any of your own innovations.




> The best method I've ever tried. Thanks to this, I succeeded in drawing the map I dreamt of.


I'm very happy to here that oterrien, you've done a bang-up job and ought to be proud!

Cheers,
-Arsheesh

----------


## oterrien

Thank you Arsheesh for your words. I am very happy to hear compliment from a god-cartographer as you.  

I put here the tutorial widely inspired from yours I have written last week. It is not a strict translation of yours but the idea is almost the same. Feel free to revert to me if any.

----------


## oterrien

Thank you JefBT. Do you prefer something like that regarding to water color ? 



That is what I expected to do for the next step.

----------


## JefBT

That's awesome oterrien.

I just complained about the water color because I like middle range colors most, but that way is good too.

By the way, that brownish map you made is wonderful, very good effect.

----------


## arsheesh

> Thank you Arsheesh for your words. I am very happy to hear compliment from a god-cartographer as you.  
> 
> I put here the tutorial widely inspired from yours I have written last week. It is not a strict translation of yours but the idea is almost the same. Feel free to revert to me if any.


Unfortunately I do not speak French, but I was able to follow along with the tutorial just be the example images.  A really nice tutorial Oterrian, you've done a great job innovating it and taking it in a new direction.  Thanks for sharing it.

Cheers,
-Arsheesh

----------


## oterrien

> That's awesome oterrien.
> 
> I just complained about the water color because I like middle range colors most, but that way is good too.
> 
> By the way, that brownish map you made is wonderful, very good effect.


I redid my map by adding more reliefs and lightening the sea. And then, I took the opportunity to add cities. Do you think it is better ?

----------


## JefBT

It's fantastic, oterrien. Everything looks very nice, and the lakes and the plateaus are awesome.

----------


## arsheesh

> I redid my map by adding more reliefs and lightening the sea. And then, I took the opportunity to add cities. Do you think it is better ?
> 
> Attachment 63537


I like the sea colors a lot.  Very attractive!  I might suggest more of an off-white rather than the tan color for the label background blur, at least where the labels overlap with the ocean, but otherwise I think this turned out beautifully.  

Cheers,
-Arsheesh

----------


## ludgarthewarwolf

Okay, so I've hit a snag with the rivers. I have the mountains and everything pretty naturally blended into the difference cloud maps, and when I load it into Wilbur I get a pretty nice looking map. My issue is that when I try to make the rivers using arsheesh's method of incise flow erosion, the river's are either jagged lines, or spiderwebs. I've also tried to use waldronate's method of a waterways mask, but that wasn't working either. What do I do? 
Pic of the map when loaded into wilbur:

Pic of map right before incise flow:

----------


## Deadshade

I am just a newbie and started with Learning digital mapping techniques only 2 weeks ago.
I noticed that I when I was using the Terraformer in FT3 and added clouds, then when I loaded the file in Wilbur, the clouds were interpreted like altitude maps giving interesting and realistic shapes.
Unfortunately I was unable to edit these shapes to give a map I wanted and then I happened on this tutorial doing exactly what I wanted to do.
First results are good and that's why I would also like to say a loud Thank you.
Really an impressively efficient workflow!

Btw a small comment. As I am not a very proficient GIMP user, I followed the tutorial literally step by step and noticed a confusing explanation in the first part.
It should be :
New layer>White (Clouds 2)
Set mode to difference
Filter>Render>Clouds>Difference Clouds
*Set mode to difference*  (because the previous operation resets the mode to normal)
New from Visible (Difference1)
Then same for Clouds4

So (unless I severely misunderstood something) the Set mode to difference has to be done* twice*  what was not clear from the tutorial

----------


## Deadshade

OK after a break I wanted to continue the tutorial but definitively crashed at page 7 with the gradient map.
I think that there was a problem that I couldn't identify with the creation of the bump map - probably at the stage when the temperate layer was created and filled with grey.
Here is how looks my temperate layer before  I start to apply the first gradient - left side page 8 of the tutorial.



When I apply the gradient the whole map turns black with the exception of the small very white dots which correspond to the highest peaks on the planet. Zooming on them I see that they are collored by the whole Spectrum of the gradient eg from black to white through the greens and browns.
Also note the strange flat grey shapes which correspond exactly to the mountain mask (the grey is the grey that was used to fill the temperate layer at its creation). Yes, all the layers and channels are turned off when I apply the gradient - only temperate is on.

So I have 2 problems - one is that for some reason the mountains are masked on the temperate layer with the exception of the highest peaks but this is not lethal. This would only make an ugly map  :Smile: 
What is lethal is that I can't get the layer covered by the whole gradient Spectrum even if I edited it many times. Whatever the setting, the whole map is basically only one color (black, green , Brown) , the totality of the Spectrum can be only seen on the microscopic white dots.

Can somebody help me with that ?

----------


## ltan

Deadshade:  I have no clue what I am doing, but have you made a copy of the gradient?  I found that was the only way that I could edit the gradient to change the color levels.  The only other part I would check over is when using Wilbur and setting the Mathematical > Spans.  Perhaps those two values need to be adjusted as well?


For the record, here is my attempt.  I am not entirely pleased with it as I think the mountains are eyesores.

----------


## Deadshade

> Deadshade:  I have no clue what I am doing, but have you made a copy of the gradient?  I found that was the only way that I could edit the gradient to change the color levels.  The only other part I would check over is when using Wilbur and setting the Mathematical > Spans.  Perhaps those two values need to be adjusted as well?



Yes I have noticed that only copied gradients were editable. Apparently GIMP doesn't allow to edit gradients that are supposed to be standard.
But this is not my problem, I didn't  edit the gradients because the tutorial doesn't say so.
I just followed the instructions literally.
So I arrive at page 8 and my temperate layer is exactly the grey shaded map I joined above. Clearly there is already something that went wrong but this not (yet) a problem either - I still have a grey shaded map as I should even if it is ugly.


Next is a basic step : the tutorial says "*Layers (Temperate) > Colors > Map > Gradient map*"
This is just a matter on selecting tabs so nothing can go wrong. Theoretically I should get something like Figure 17 (p. :Cool: .
But I don't. What I get is that everything goes black with the exception of the white dots (tops of mountains) which go over the whole gradient (e.g from black to white).
So here is something that goes seriously wrong and I have no idea what.

It was only then that I created a copy of the gradient and pushed the black all way to left.
Then executed again the command above. This time the whole map went dark green with the exception of mountain tops.
So it is the same effect like above - for some reason when the gradient is applied on my grey shade map, it decides to color everything with just one color (or an extremely narrow band around one color).
Whenever I change the gradient I just change the color of the band but it still stays tiny so that the result is like everything has only one color.

Perhaps if somebody took my map and applied the gradient on it could tell me what is wrong ?

Anyway thanks for the answer.

----------


## ltan

Deadshade:  Do you have a copy of your map prior to getting to the gradients?  Your mountains look heavily saturated, which either happened prior to Wilbur, or something done in Wilbur flattened them perhaps?

Here is what my height map looks like going into Wilbur: 

If it looks good going into Wilbur, and coming out, then possibly your Channel Masks are funky?

hth

Jason

Edit: Wait, I think I understand what you are trying to do and my comment on saturation may not be valid.

If what I am thinking that you are trying to do, this is what I was able to adjust the sliders to for your map:



And buried a bit in the text on page 8, just before the first tooltip, it states:

"You will likely have to "Undo" the gradient map, adjust the various segments of the color pointer bar, and then gradient map the layer again.  I usually have to do this several times..."

Again, I am not sure if my suspicions on what you are attempting to do are right or not, nor am I sure that I have done the gradient any better than you have o.0"

Edit Last: I also had to change the mode to RGB for the image you attached above.  Not sure if that changes anything or not.

----------


## ltan

ludgarthewarwolf: Mind attaching an image of what your resulting image is *after* incise flow?  Also, what settings are you using?

----------


## Deadshade

> If what I am thinking that you are trying to do, this is what I was able to adjust the sliders to for your map:
> 
> 
> And buried a bit in the text on page 8, just before the first tooltip, it states:
> 
> "You will likely have to "Undo" the gradient map, adjust the various segments of the color pointer bar, and then gradient map the layer again.  I usually have to do this several times..."
> 
> Again, I am not sure if my suspicions on what you are attempting to do are right or not, nor am I sure that I have done the gradient any better than you have o.0"
> 
> Edit Last: I also had to change the mode to RGB for the image you attached above.  Not sure if that changes anything or not.


Thanks for your comment ltan.
Actually the map I linked is what I have  getting out of Wilbur and the strange flat tops on the mountains is something that happened in Gimp during combining masks or something like that (I suspect the bump map process)
Yes I read the page 8 that's why I played with the sliders to try to get a bigger portion of the gradient than just the black part.
And yes I also get exactly the same thing you did (after moving gradient sliders) what shows that only an infinitesimally small band around green is used and I am far from something like figure 17.
So now what's sure is that not any gray shader map can be colored by the gradients correctly. But I have no idea of just how grey or white or whatever it must be to use the whole range of the gradient.

Surprisingly though, my Height map isn't so different from what is shown in Figure 13. Probably darker but globally similar.

Any idea why when the gradient is applied it uses just a small part of the spectrum instead of the whole range ?
I thought (probably naively) that the gradient command automatically sets the left gradient end to black (0) and the right end to white (1) and then gives to every pixel a number between 0 and 1 depending how much black and white it contains.
For instance a pixel 0.75 (clear grey 1/4 black and 3/4 white) would get the color which is at 3/4th of the gradient.
Apparently this is not what it does  :Frown:

----------


## ltan

Without seeing the height map I can only guess...

One thing that I would note is that I reduce the contrast on my "Land Clouds" layer by -50 instead of -25, page 3.  It is acting like there is not enough difference between your land clouds and your mountain clouds.

Well, the map looks ok other than those saturated mountains.  Have you tried applying a bump map without doing an of the masking and then applying the gradient to see if it gives you the same issues?  It might be that there is something getting messy with the layer masks.

I took the image above and used just the land mass shapes and started fresh.  This is what I have on the temperate layer.



It is overly grainy, too much noise I think, but It is pointing that something between going into Wilbur, and applying the gradients is where you should focus at.  For the bump mapping, play with the values until it looks the way you want it to.  Before going on to doing all of the layers for deserts and the artics, I would do a quick temperate gradient to make sure it looks like it is going to work.

----------


## Deadshade

> Without seeing the height map I can only guess...
> 
> One thing that I would note is that I reduce the contrast on my "Land Clouds" layer by -50 instead of -25, page 3.  It is acting like there is not enough difference between your land clouds and your mountain clouds.
> 
> Well, the map looks ok other than those saturated mountains.  Have you tried applying a bump map without doing an of the masking and then applying the gradient to see if it gives you the same issues?  It might be that there is something getting messy with the layer masks.
> 
> .


Many thanks ltan

The height map looks extremely similar to the one I linked. The difference are the flat top mountains (that happened somwhere during the bump map process) and it is (perhaps) the slightest bit whiter than the map I linked.

It is here : 


Yes observing that only a small part of the gradient was used, I also deduced that there was probably not "enough" difference between the greys (contrast ?). However as I don't know what is the measure of "contrast" and what is the Relationship between the selection of a given gradient's color and the "contrast" I am of course stuck.
One must not forget that I ignored everything about mapping software 3 weeks ago and tried GIMP for the first time some 10 days ago while trying to learn in parallel Wilbur and FT3. So I am still a certified newbie on all accounts  :Smile: 


No I didn't try to change anything in the commands given by the tutorial, because I am still Learning what are channels, masks and layers and can't say that I could use them effciently if I improvised. I have a thread here where people teach me how to use these Gimp concepts.
So I scrupulously followed the commands especially in the bump map part which I found quite messy indeed and despite that I must have done something wrong somewhere anyway because the flat grey mountain tops are something not normal that appeared during this process.

----------


## ltan

Deadshade: Yup, I saw that you are getting the technical help in another thread so I am offering the more practical side  :Smile: ...  Mind you, I am still new to mapping myself but not so much GiMP.

So, something caught my eye with the above map image.  Your mountains seem really smoothed.  Did you apply a blur to them?  That is probably why they do not appear detailed.  I think, just a hunch, that you might have been a bit too heavy with the sculpting process and smoothed too much of your mountains.  Taking a sample of your recent image I did this:



Which looks pleasing to my eye, and perhaps not yours  :Wink: 

Then applying the gradient, I have included where my sliders are so you can compare:




I think that if you go back and redo your mountain sculpting and not blur the whole mountain but the edges, one thing I have been doing lately is to change the layer mode to lighten only and then blurring the areas that still stick out after looking at the Wilbur import, I think that you will find your mountains looking better, and your gradient might start appearing the way it is expected as well.


Edit:  Also, the most important thing about following a tutorial, more importantly one that is artistic, is this...  Adjust things until *you* think they look right.  Since you are following along with a different file than the tutorial, and often times a completely different subject matter, you will need to adjust settings so that your images have the same level of appearance as the tutorial.  As I stated above in one of my posts, I had to adjust my contrast by -50 instead of the tutorials -25 to get a result that looked decent.  It is going to be a trial and error process, and the tutorial is supplying settings that should be considered the starting point.

I apologize now if I state the already known...  I used to teach and I had to cover already known content to some so that those who needed it could catch up.  It is a habit that I seem to carry over into everything I do now :/

----------


## Deadshade

Thousand thanks ! This is great !
No I didn't use blur.
Actually I was going through the tutorial to mostly learn things. So even if I think that I can now use Wilbur reasonably well (in any case compared to Gimp) I didn't spend much time with working "realistically" the height map.
What I did was a succession of erosion, basin filling and incising to just get a general shape in order to try to get color on it what was the target. An annoying thing is that the eroding process erodes the mountain tops as well.

Now I see that you succeeded with a really heavy deformation of the gradient and what you get looks right to me. You just applied the gradient directly to the height map or you did some special Gimp magics first ?
The contrast was the first thing I thought about when I failed with the gradient but I couldn't find where the hell is this contrast among the billions of Gimp tabs.

Same can be said about the layer modes - I opened it once and saw that there was a hundred options so that to find out what they did by trial and error would take at least a month with 5 hours/week what I approximately dedicate to it so I gave up the modes for the time being.
What is up with this "lighten only" mode you mention ?

On a completely unrelated front. I have just created a nice fractal coast in another software but for resolution/size reasons can't export it directly in Wilbur. So I will need to cut it up in 4 or more probably 6 parts and then put them again together.
I think I read somewhere that Gimp can do that. Can you give me a general idea how to do it - import 6 pieces and merge them together ?

----------


## ltan

Deadshade:  I will send instructions on stitching the images together in a PM so as not to hijack this thread from the main tutorial.  

As far as getting the gradient to work,  I made a copy of the height map, then using the copy I applied the bump map.  The image I used for the bump map was the same layer that I was applying the bump map to.  This may not be the correct method of ding things as I am having artifacts on the sides of my mountains that makes them look poo-ish.  Once the bump map has been applied, the settings I used above in this case, I then made that resulting image the Temperate layer.  Then applied the gradient there.

----------


## ludgarthewarwolf

> ludgarthewarwolf: Mind attaching an image of what your resulting image is *after* incise flow?  Also, what settings are you using?


 oops, forgot to check back in. It was the settings, I messed around with it a bit and got it to where it looked nice, here's what it ended up looking like.

----------


## arsheesh

Hi everyone.  Apologies for not chiming in to lend a hand.  I've been away from the Guild for the last 6 or so months.  




> I am just a newbie and started with Learning digital mapping techniques only 2 weeks ago.
> I noticed that I when I was using the Terraformer in FT3 and added clouds, then when I loaded the file in Wilbur, the clouds were interpreted like altitude maps giving interesting and realistic shapes.
> Unfortunately I was unable to edit these shapes to give a map I wanted and then I happened on this tutorial doing exactly what I wanted to do.
> First results are good and that's why I would also like to say a loud Thank you.
> Really an impressively efficient workflow!
> 
> Btw a small comment. As I am not a very proficient GIMP user, I followed the tutorial literally step by step and noticed a confusing explanation in the first part.
> It should be :
> New layer>White (Clouds 2)
> ...


Yup, you're quite right about that Deadshade.  Must have missed this.  Thanks for bringing it to my attention.  I've uploaded a corrected tutorial.




> Thousand thanks ! This is great !
> No I didn't use blur.
> Actually I was going through the tutorial to mostly learn things. So even if I think that I can now use Wilbur reasonably well (in any case compared to Gimp) I didn't spend much time with working "realistically" the height map.
> What I did was a succession of erosion, basin filling and incising to just get a general shape in order to try to get color on it what was the target. An annoying thing is that the eroding process erodes the mountain tops as well.
> 
> Now I see that you succeeded with a really heavy deformation of the gradient and what you get looks right to me. You just applied the gradient directly to the height map or you did some special Gimp magics first ?
> The contrast was the first thing I thought about when I failed with the gradient but I couldn't find where the hell is this contrast among the billions of Gimp tabs.
> 
> Same can be said about the layer modes - I opened it once and saw that there was a hundred options so that to find out what they did by trial and error would take at least a month with 5 hours/week what I approximately dedicate to it so I gave up the modes for the time being.
> ...


I'm afraid that without looking at your GIMP .xcf file directly I'm not sure why most of the mountains (save for the tips) got blacked out.  As for the gradient map, I've noticed that even slight differences in the brightness and contrast of of a heightmap will require adjustments to the gradient map.  I've had to edit the gradient map for nearly each now map I do in the Eriond style, and sometimes that has resulted in widely different gradient maps.  




> Deadshade:  I will send instructions on stitching the images together in a PM so as not to hijack this thread from the main tutorial.  
> 
> As far as getting the gradient to work,  I made a copy of the height map, then using the copy I applied the bump map.  The image I used for the bump map was the same layer that I was applying the bump map to.  This may not be the correct method of ding things as I am having artifacts on the sides of my mountains that makes them look poo-ish.  Once the bump map has been applied, the settings I used above in this case, I then made that resulting image the Temperate layer.  Then applied the gradient there.


Itan, thanks for stepping in and offering to lend a hand in my absence.  




> oops, forgot to check back in. It was the settings, I messed around with it a bit and got it to where it looked nice, here's what it ended up looking like.


Ludgarthewarwolf, glad to see that you figured out the problem without my help.  Nice job on this map BTW, it turned out great.

Cheers,
-Arsheesh

----------


## Carl Taylor

I LOVE your mapping skills, however I am struggling to get along with GIMP. Do you have a tutorial for photoshop at all? (I've been using that for the last 10 years and to go to gimp seems somewhat alien to me  :Frown:  I want to make a map for my fantasy book I'm writing).

----------


## arsheesh

> I LOVE your mapping skills, however I am struggling to get along with GIMP. Do you have a tutorial for photoshop at all? (I've been using that for the last 10 years and to go to gimp seems somewhat alien to me  I want to make a map for my fantasy book I'm writing).


Hi Carl, thanks much for the compliment.  Sadly I do not own Photoshop and am only somewhat familiar with the program.  So to answer your question, no, I do not have any Photoshop tutorials.  Perhaps someday though.  Best wishes.

Cheers,
-Arsheesh

----------


## Carl Taylor

No problem. I would be willing to allow you to use my Adobe CC account, but eh, security issues with that, think adobe would question signing on from England then in New Zealand. lol

----------


## woekan

Im having trouble generating interesting mountain patterns in photoshop. Any tips on that?
Also. What would you define as an interesting mountain pattern?

The addition blend mode in Gimp, what would that be in Photoshop? Screen?

----------


## Deadshade

> Im having trouble generating interesting mountain patterns in photoshop. Any tips on that?
> Also. What would you define as an interesting mountain pattern?


Mountains are fractal. So for me interesting patterns are fractal too. Basically Wilbur can create interesting patterns while PS or Gimp can't because they don't allow the interesting fractal settings that Wilbur does.

----------


## woekan

I got the mountains working. Now im stuck at the gradient. I cant make it near as pretty as the gimp tutorial.
Im using Photoshop. Any tips for me?

Also Bump map tool doesnt excist in Photoshop. Instead i used emboss, but this seems to make the map a little blurry.

----------


## arsheesh

> Im having trouble generating interesting mountain patterns in photoshop. Any tips on that?
> Also. What would you define as an interesting mountain pattern?
> 
> The addition blend mode in Gimp, what would that be in Photoshop? Screen?


Sadly I don't own (and am unfamiliar with) Photoshop CS.  I do own Photoshop Elements but only use it for my tablet work, and am not too familiar with it either.  What I can tell you is that in GIMP "Addition" is lighter and subtler than "Screen".  You might try "Lighten" in Photoshop, not sure.




> I got the mountains working. Now im stuck at the gradient. I cant make it near as pretty as the gimp tutorial.
> Im using Photoshop. Any tips for me?
> 
> Also Bump map tool doesnt excist in Photoshop. Instead i used emboss, but this seems to make the map a little blurry.


Here I'm not going to be much help to you, because again, I'm not too familiar with Photoshop.  However I'd direct you to check out jezelf's tutorials since he uses some similar techniques in his tutorials as the Eriond tutorial.  Also, here's an example of his workflow that he posted a few years back (I'd link to thread but our search filter doesn't seem to be working so instead I've uploaded it directly).



Hope his tutorials are a help to you.

Cheers,
-Arsheesh

----------


## woekan

Thanks for the tips Arsheesh!
Here is my result using photoshop.

----------


## arsheesh

Those mountains look cool!  Much different than the ones I've made using GIMP.  For some reason the ocean appears overly dark though.  Was that intentional?  

Cheers,
-Arsheesh

----------


## wdmartin

Just a note -- I relied heavily on this tutorial for Erobelis Isle, which turned out well even though I wound up not using cloud-generated terrain after all.



I also used DonDozone's realistic forests, and relied heavily on help from su_liam and deadshade for getting the Wilbur part worked out.

----------


## arsheesh

> Just a note -- I relied heavily on this tutorial for Erobelis Isle, which turned out well even though I wound up not using cloud-generated terrain after all.
> 
> 
> 
> I also used DonDozone's realistic forests, and relied heavily on help from su_liam and deadshade for getting the Wilbur part worked out.


Wow, that turned out fantastic wdmartin!  The terrain looks very good (and I do really like the trees as well.  The colors are great too.  All around great job!

Cheers,
-Arsheesh

----------


## JonK

Hey, I really love your work.  I understand that the tutorial is intermediate/advanced, but I keep getting hung up on the cloud effects, specifically were you tell us to rinse and repeat for Cloud 3 and Cloud 4.  When I change Cloud 4 to difference, I just get a black screen!

----------


## Abu Lafia

Hi JonK, I'm not arsheesh but if i remember correctly i had a similar problem. You have to create a  (click on) "new seed" in the difference-clouds settings for the second (4.) layer. 
I think the differnce-cloud-settings were the same for your second layer, and with two identical layers there is no differnce (black-screen). Hope it helps!

----------


## ludgarthewarwolf

Finished my second map using this tutorial, used my own mountain technique this time. CC welcomed, the world is called Donne.

----------


## arsheesh

Hey there ludgarthewarwolf, congrats on finishing your second map!

Nice job on the mountains.  OK, you asked for CC, and I do have a few pointers for you.  First, the map looks as if it has been stretched horizontally.  I'm not sure if this is because you scaled the image so that it would be wider, or if when you created the clouds layer you did not adjust the X and Y size to account for the different height/width dimensions.  Second, the rivers look really angular.  This usually happens when there isn't enough %noise when you are running Incise Flow in Wilbur.  Here's a tip.  After you've done the initial "Fill Basins" step, go to the select menu, click on "From Terrain", and then click "Flat Areas".  Net add more noise (usually 5% is sufficient, but you may need to go as high as 10% - just test it out).  Then do another "Fill Basins", followed by "Incise Flow".  This ought to get those rivers looking more natural.  

Hope that helps.

Cheers,
-Arsheesh

----------


## ludgarthewarwolf

> Hey there ludgarthewarwolf, congrats on finishing your second map!
> 
> Nice job on the mountains.  OK, you asked for CC, and I do have a few pointers for you.  First, the map looks as if it has been stretched horizontally.  I'm not sure if this is because you scaled the image so that it would be wider, or if when you created the clouds layer you did not adjust the X and Y size to account for the different height/width dimensions.  Second, the rivers look really angular.  This usually happens when there isn't enough %noise when you are running Incise Flow in Wilbur.  Here's a tip.  After you've done the initial "Fill Basins" step, go to the select menu, click on "From Terrain", and then click "Flat Areas".  Net add more noise (usually 5% is sufficient, but you may need to go as high as 10% - just test it out).  Then do another "Fill Basins", followed by "Incise Flow".  This ought to get those rivers looking more natural.  
> 
> Hope that helps.
> 
> Cheers,
> -Arsheesh


I've so far been unable to find the "flat area" option in the from terrain selection. I'm running wilbur 1.62 if that helps. I've also experimented with using the compute basin deltas to make selections, but haven't had a large amount of success. If you're interested I can whip up a quick tutorial about how I made the mountains. I'm artistically challenged, so I found a way to do it without much airbrushing.
Thanks,
Ludgar

----------


## arsheesh

Hmm, that's odd.  I'm not exactly sure which version I have but under mine flat areas can be found under: Select > From Terrain > Flat Areas.  Does the "From Terrain" sub menu not exist in Wilbur 1.62, or does it just not contain the "Flat Areas" option?  You should definitely whip up a tutorial, it may prove useful to folks here.

Cheers,
-Arsheesh

----------


## ludgarthewarwolf

> Hmm, that's odd.  I'm not exactly sure which version I have but under mine flat areas can be found under: Select > From Terrain > Flat Areas.  Does the "From Terrain" sub menu not exist in Wilbur 1.62, or does it just not contain the "Flat Areas" option?  You should definitely whip up a tutorial, it may prove useful to folks here.
> 
> Cheers,
> -Arsheesh


Nope, just height range and facing direction. I believe you can check your version by clicking the yellow ? in the tool bar. I'll get working on those mountains.

----------


## waldronate

Those features were introduced in Wilbur 1.65; version 1.62 was released back in mid-2007. 1.83 was the last public version.

I really should get that stuff rehosted, but that sounds way harder than I have the mental capacity and time for these days...

----------


## ludgarthewarwolf

> Those features were introduced in Wilbur 1.65; version 1.62 was released back in mid-2007. 1.83 was the last public version.
> 
> I really should get that stuff rehosted, but that sounds way harder than I have the mental capacity and time for these days...


Could you link me the most recent version? Thanks

----------


## Azélor

> Those features were introduced in Wilbur 1.65; version 1.62 was released back in mid-2007. 1.83 was the last public version.
> 
> I really should get that stuff rehosted, but that sounds way harder than I have the mental capacity and time for these days...


Have you considered a free hosting service like Media fire? The file is not too big.

----------


## waldronate

The Wilbur site has been offline for a few months now at the whim of my old ISP. When I get it rehosted, I'll post the new address here at the guild and to every place I can find contacts for that links to the old address and can be found via the googlybeast.

----------


## waldronate

> Have you considered a free hosting service like Media fire? The file is not too big.


My #1 requirement for hosting is no third-party advertising visible on the pages.

----------


## Azélor

Ads are optional, unless your using Internet explorer maybe.

----------


## ludgarthewarwolf

Just an update; I've found the current version of Wilbur, and now river erosion is working like the tutorial. My mountains tutorial is progressing okay; biggest deal is just remembering how exactly I did it.

----------


## Hedron

It's been a while, but now I'm back into gaming again I thought I try mapping again.

Everything's worked so far, but when it comes to the bump mapping part,  I must be doing something wrong, as when you say to use a Grey (value 15) to get rid of the oceanic "rivers", I can't figure out what you mean.

I've tried to use #7f7f7f, but that screws up the colour gradient step

----------


## ludgarthewarwolf

i just used a land mask myself.

----------


## arsheesh

> It's been a while, but now I'm back into gaming again I thought I try mapping again.
> 
> Everything's worked so far, but when it comes to the bump mapping part,  I must be doing something wrong, as when you say to use a Grey (value 15) to get rid of the oceanic "rivers", I can't figure out what you mean.
> 
> I've tried to use #7f7f7f, but that screws up the colour gradient step


In the color dialogue you can adjust the value of white to black which ranges from 0 (Black) to 100 (white).  But you can also just use the color code: 262626.




> i just used a land mask myself.


Yup, that works too.

Cheers,
-Arsheesh

----------


## Hedron

> In the color dialogue you can adjust the value of white to black which ranges from 0 (Black) to 100 (white).  But you can also just use the color code: 262626.


Thanks, that sorted it.

----------


## ludgarthewarwolf

Finally done with the second run through with the updated version of Wilbur, here's the results:

----------


## GinnyStar

This is quite good, I like very much :--)

----------


## arsheesh

Sorry for the late reply.  Rivers are definitely much improved!  The colors look more natural as well.  Nice job.

Cheers,
-Arsheesh

----------


## Logan Medved

Is there any place I can find this tutorial but using Photoshop instead of GiMP?

----------


## arsheesh

> Is there any place I can find this tutorial but using Photoshop instead of GiMP?


Unfortunately I only have PS Elements and am not familiar enough with the Creative Sweet program to be able to translate the tutorial.  I'm sure many of the steps are similar though.  You may want to check out a2area's Israh tutorial and Jezelf's making maps in PS tutorial both of which use some similar techniques in PS.

Cheers,
-Arsheesh

----------


## Logan Medved

> Unfortunately I only have PS Elements and am not familiar enough with the Creative Sweet program to be able to translate the tutorial.  I'm sure many of the steps are similar though.  You may want to check out a2area's Israh tutorial and Jezelf's making maps in PS tutorial both of which use some similar techniques in PS.
> 
> Cheers,
> -Arsheesh


Thank you for the alternatives, I do appreciate it. For some reason, I'm just completely illiterate when  it comes to GiMP.

----------


## Kazzicus

Arsheesh, now that I've made an account I wanted to let you know I really love your style of cartography! I have a custom map I'm working on and didn't know if you were still around (I've been forum skulking for about 12 months now) and wanted to see if it were possible to get some advice on my map. I know the tutorial mentioned smaller than 4000 x 2000 but I like the dimensions so I can zoom in to a good degree. When I start using Difference Clouds, i find it's not as detailed and I have the sliding scale maxed out on both. Any tips?

I've really started liking cartography as a small hobby as it allows to de-stress from the daily goings on. Thanks for being a wonderful inspiration!

----------


## arsheesh

Hi Kazzicus, thanks for the kind words.  So the first thing I'd say is that if your map's height and width are not equal then you will want to adjust the X and Y size sliders accordingly (in this case, the X size should be twice that of the Y size).  Otherwise the clouds will come out stretched and distorted.  About detail, I've never had any problem with the detail of the clouds at larger sizes - and I've created maps larger than 6000x6000 px.  Did you make sure to turn the "Detail" all the way to the max of 15?

Cheers,
-Arsheesh

----------


## Durakken

So... I'm about 1 step from being done and I has a problem...
The Arctic Layer you say to add the River Mask to... and then the very next part says to used a Mask to do all the climate stuff with. But I can't do this because you can only have 1 layer mask...so should I apply the river layer mask or what?

I DLed GIMP to do this tutorial... and I've never been good with figuring out masks and channels so I might be in error here, but to me it looks more like an oversite than my lack of knowledge.

edit: Also... perhaps you can shed some light on this. When I made the Land and Mountain bumps, the Mountain was fine, but the Land bump map was very grainy to the point it looked bad. I don't know why. They're duplicate layers so that doesn't make sense to me. I ended up just duplicating the mountain layer and changing the mask. Looks fine to me, but any clue as to why the difference might have happened?

----------


## johnvanvliet

> I DLed GIMP to do this tutorial... and I've never been good with  figuring out masks and channels so I might be in error here, but to me  it looks more like an oversite than my lack of knowledge.


as a very long time user of Gimp ( yes since the gimp 0.8 days before it made the 1.0 mile stone ) 
so over 15 years 

a bit of CAUTION needs to be taken with any guide older than about 1 year 
back in gimp 2.4 the decision was made to SCRAP the code and rewrite the program from the ground up 

this guide is for Gimp2.6 a partial EARLY rewrite 

the current Gimp 2.8.14 dose somethings DIFFERENTLY than 2.4 and 2.6 
not everything but a lot is different 

the menu changed. somethings were moved to different menus , somethings removed , and somethings added  



This guide is one i actually have NOT gone through ( reading it as i type )


the first step "Generating Clouds"
( recent CHANGE ) 
you need to open the layer dialog  <control> + < l > 
-- top menu --
windows / docable dialogs / layers 

in the NEW window that pops up " the layer window" 

you will also need the Channel window 
windows / docable dialogs / channels

then
r-click on the image and the "Select" is on that menu 
the menu on the top and the right click" are right now DIFFERENT 




there have been a lot of changes in the last 3 years

----------


## Neptondoodle

Hey Arsheesh, I just wanted to say thanks for the tutorial, it's really useful, considering in the past I've worked with height/bump maps on PS, but PS died on me so I'm getting into GIMP (which is thankfully pretty similar) I just have one question as of right now.

When airbrushing, to make the mountains and land fit together, the tutorial says that we're sculpting the land clouds layer, but the mountains cloud layer is still separate from that, so It can't fully mesh unless I either airbrush on the mountain clouds layer as well, or merge them. Any advice?

Here's the issue as it stands, btw

----------


## Durakken

> the tutorial says that we're sculpting the land clouds layer, but the mountains cloud layer is still separate from that,


I think you're misreading what it says.
You airbrush the mountain edges so that the opacity is adjusted slowly to the point where the edge of mountains are it doesn't have a huge step in contrast so that the edge disappears. It has the effect of molding the land in general, but you're not messing with the land layers.

----------


## arsheesh

> Hey Arsheesh, I just wanted to say thanks for the tutorial, it's really useful, considering in the past I've worked with height/bump maps on PS, but PS died on me so I'm getting into GIMP (which is thankfully pretty similar) I just have one question as of right now.
> 
> When airbrushing, to make the mountains and land fit together, the tutorial says that we're sculpting the land clouds layer, but the mountains cloud layer is still separate from that, so It can't fully mesh unless I either airbrush on the mountain clouds layer as well, or merge them. Any advice?
> 
> Here's the issue as it stands, btw


Hi Neptondoodle, great question.  So in practice what I typically do is slightly erase the edges of the mountains cloud layer (a good trick to save time here is to use the select by color tool to select the transparent area of the area surrounding the mountains, grow the selection slightly - 5-20 px depending on the size of your map - then feather the selection by about the same amount and click delete) so that we can get rid of the hard edges, then gradually add layers of paint to the land clouds layer until the values of the two layers blend seamlessly together.  




> I think you're misreading what it says.
> You airbrush the mountain edges so that the opacity is adjusted slowly to the point where the edge of mountains are it doesn't have a huge step in contrast so that the edge disappears. It has the effect of molding the land in general, but you're not messing with the land layers.


Thanks for your reply Durakken.  I have tried the method you describe with some success.  However one downside is that when painting on the mountains cloud layer one may partially obscure the cloud texture of the land clouds layer below.  On the other hand, by painting on the land clouds layer directly I've found that the values and textures of the clouds are better preserved (see my above comment for details of my method).  However both methods work.

Cheers,
-Arsheesh

----------


## Neptondoodle

> Hi Neptondoodle, great question.  So in practice what I typically do is slightly erase the edges of the mountains cloud layer (a good trick to save time here is to use the select by color tool to select the transparent area of the area surrounding the mountains, grow the selection slightly - 5-20 px depending on the size of your map - then feather the selection by about the same amount and click delete) so that we can get rid of the hard edges, then gradually add layers of paint to the land clouds layer until the values of the two layers blend seamlessly together.


Ah, so you airbrush white then, not black? I think I see. I think the fault in my map lies with myself then, I don't think I erased the edges enough (And I began erasing with a hard brush before I realized my mistake)

Also, I just had a thought. Have you ever created a new layer, and selected more or less the same color as the color you'd like the edges to be, then painted around the edges and hit the layer with a Gaussian Blur?


EDIT
I just experimented airbrushing the mountain layer to the point where the edge was just visible, then going over it with a soft eraser at 20% opacity. That'll work out pretty well for fixing those areas I accidentally took a hard eraser to earlier I think.

----------


## arsheesh

> Also, I just had a thought. Have you ever created a new layer, and selected more or less the same color as the color you'd like the edges to be, then painted around the edges and hit the layer with a Gaussian Blur?
> 
> 
> EDIT
> I just experimented airbrushing the mountain layer to the point where the edge was just visible, then going over it with a soft eraser at 20% opacity. That'll work out pretty well for fixing those areas I accidentally took a hard eraser to earlier I think.


Yup, that will work too.  However like I mentioned in my above comment to Durakken one downside of painting on a layer above the land clouds is that this may somewhat obscure the texture of the bottom layer.  I've found that airbrushing the land clouds layer directly tends to better preserve this texture (but this is just a personal taste).

----------


## ludgarthewarwolf

Just wanted to post the latest map I made with this tutorial. It was made for a short lived project on reddit called conglerma. Unfortunately it seems to have since died, but I thought the map should see the light of day outside of the project so here it is:

----------


## arsheesh

Cool land shapes!  I like how you did the mountains.  Great job on this.

Cheers,
-Arsheesh

----------


## Coriolis

> Hi Neptondoodle, great question.  So in practice what I typically do is slightly erase the edges of the mountains cloud layer (a good trick to save time here is to use the select by color tool to select the transparent area of the area surrounding the mountains, grow the selection slightly - 5-20 px depending on the size of your map - then feather the selection by about the same amount and click delete) so that we can get rid of the hard edges, then gradually add layers of paint to the land clouds layer until the values of the two layers blend seamlessly together.  
> 
> 
> 
> Thanks for your reply Durakken.  I have tried the method you describe with some success.  However one downside is that when painting on the mountains cloud layer one may partially obscure the cloud texture of the land clouds layer below.  On the other hand, by painting on the land clouds layer directly I've found that the values and textures of the clouds are better preserved (see my above comment for details of my method).  However both methods work.
> 
> Cheers,
> -Arsheesh


I do a variation on Arsheesh's technique here. I like to use the smudge tool to blend the mountains into the surrounding terrain. This allows the mountains to have descending ridges. It also gives me a method for sculpting the mountains themselves. I still airbrush the land beneath it as well.

----------


## johnvanvliet

as of Gimp 2.8 there was added a "heal" tool 
no need to try to blend  something using the smudge tool

----------


## Coriolis

Interesting; I haven't played with that yet. I'll give it a try. Thanks!

----------


## johnvanvliet

you will need to read the instructions for the gimp heal tool 

the percent of the transparency controls how much of the selected area VS the inferred is used 
i normally use a 25% hard brush with 10% to 15% transparency

----------


## Scarge

So I found this tutorial after stumbling on your maps over at DA, and went ahead and tried it out.

Things...didn't go smoothly. I'm not sure how much of the issues are just because of the changes to GIMP over the years and which are just because of my inexperience. If it doesn't hurt too much to look at, could you tell me where things went wrong, if it's clear from how it turned out?

I'll note that the clouds I got from the first few steps were very different from the ones pictured, which may have led to other issues down the line.

----------


## arsheesh

I see what you mean Scarge.  Best guess is that you may have applied the "Bump Map" filter to the wrong layer.  It's an easy mistake to make.  See, when you open the "Bump Map" pop up menu at the top of the window it has a field for you to choose which layer you want to apply the bump map to.  I think by default the top layer of your stack is selected (I could be wrong though).  So if you don't manually select the layer you want the filter to be applied to then you might end up with it being applied to the wrong layer.

Further, the water looks almost black, which indicates that one of your layers above the Color Map layer is overlapping the ocean portion with a darker color.  Again this probably has to do with the bump map layer.  Unless you added a layer mask to that layer which blocked out the ocean portion then chances are the bump mapped layer is the layer that is causing your ocean to be so dark.

I'd try starting over from the point just after you've got your new height map from Wilbur and then working through the next few steps of the tutorial with what I've said in mind.  Hopefully this will resolve the issue.

Cheers,
-Arsheesh

----------


## waldronate

The speckled appearance of the bump map is what I often see if I forget to do a "fill basins" step in Wilbur between adding noise and performing "incise flow".

----------


## Scarge

Thanks for the tips, I'll be keeping a close eye on the things you two mentioned.

However, I've actually decided to start again from scratch - my first runthrough of the tutorial took a while, and it's easier for me to try again with a new map than attempt the process again from halfway through. It'll also be a 2100x2100 map, so I won't need to fiddle with any settings like I had to with the other one (which also confused me a bit; I wasn't sure where to add the extra Fill Basin and Noise step that you mention using for larger maps).

I've just completed the land cloud isolation step, and I've run into something that caused me some trouble before, namely that my land clouds are a lot darker than yours. Is this something I should just correct later when airbrushing, or is there a setting I should have changed to keep this from happening?



As you can see, there are parts of the landmass that are so dark they're indistinguishable from the oceans.

----------


## arsheesh

Hmm, yeah those do appear pretty dark.  Not sure why this is, but you can always adjust this by playing with the brightness/contrast settings.  To do this, click the "Colors" menu and then click on the "Brightness/Contrast" filter.  A pop up menu will appear.  Just play with the sliders till you get something that roughly matches the reference image.

----------


## Scarge

In hindsight I'm wondering why I didn't think of that.

Thanks for all the quick responses, by the way. I think it's pretty cool that I can ask about a 3-year-old tutorial and get same-day answers.

----------


## johnvanvliet

instead of the  "brightness/contrast" it looks more like a GAMA issue 
move the gama point to say 1.4 or 1.6 from 1.0 

a 1.6 gama move

----------


## Scarge

I assume I'll need to brighten up the dark paths during the airbrushing stage, to avoid them all becoming massive rivers?

----------


## arsheesh

> I assume I'll need to brighten up the dark paths during the airbrushing stage, to avoid them all becoming massive rivers?


Yup, that would be correct.

Cheers,
-Arsheesh

----------


## PeterRJG

> Just wanted to post the latest map I made with this tutorial. It was made for a short lived project on reddit called conglerma. Unfortunately it seems to have since died, but I thought the map should see the light of day outside of the project so here it is:
> Attachment 78580


That is awesome. It reminds me a bit of the world map for Brian Aldiss' Helliconia trilogy.

----------


## Durakken

Tried doing this in Photoshop CS6... It ended up not going well

The Mountain Difference Cloud layer is near impossible to make 
The Masking options are different and as a result the masking portions don't work... which is a lot of it. I got to trying to sculp mountains and I couldn't get it to look well.
I'm pretty sure the Land type layers would work, but from what I have seen GIMP's airbrush is better or something about Photoshop is making it hard to get it right.

----------


## arsheesh

> Tried doing this in Photoshop CS6... It ended up not going well
> 
> The Mountain Difference Cloud layer is near impossible to make 
> The Masking options are different and as a result the masking portions don't work... which is a lot of it. I got to trying to sculp mountains and I couldn't get it to look well.
> I'm pretty sure the Land type layers would work, but from what I have seen GIMP's airbrush is better or something about Photoshop is making it hard to get it right.


Hmm, I really wouldn't know since all I have is Photoshop Elements and I'm really not all that familiar with it.  You might be right.

----------


## Durakken

Working on a new thing, decided to make a new map. This is the second time I used this tutorial.
Still haven't magically figured out how to do mountains well... The main problem i had was messing with the temperate gradient which didn't look all that good and I had to go try to figure out how the editor works which I still don't really know... Oh well.

----------


## Coriolis

So I've decided to try an experiment with this technique: a poster-sized map. I'm going for a 10200x6600 pixel image, which I intend to print on a 22x34 inch poster at 300 dpi. This is about 8 times the size of the largest maps I've made to date. I'm up to the point where I'm placing mountains. I'm having no stability issues so far with GIMP, though the file size is growing quite fast (500 MB and climbing). Swapping layers and running filters takes longer, but the commands are working. I'm curious to see how WILBUR handles it.

Any suggestions and/or adjustments to the tutorial that you'd recommend? I'm thinking that when I get to WILBUR, I should cut the percentage noise to 0.5% or so. I'm also trying to keep the layer count in GIMP as low as I can.

----------


## Josiah VE

> So I've decided to try an experiment with this technique: a poster-sized map. I'm going for a 10200x6600 pixel image, which I intend to print on a 22x34 inch poster at 300 dpi. This is about 8 times the size of the largest maps I've made to date. I'm up to the point where I'm placing mountains. I'm having no stability issues so far with GIMP, though the file size is growing quite fast (500 MB and climbing). Swapping layers and running filters takes longer, but the commands are working. I'm curious to see how WILBUR handles it.
> 
> Any suggestions and/or adjustments to the tutorial that you'd recommend? I'm thinking that when I get to WILBUR, I should cut the percentage noise to 0.5% or so. I'm also trying to keep the layer count in GIMP as low as I can.


That is a massive image... very massive. I believe photoshop runs giant files better than GIMP, but if GIMP is working that's good.

I'm not too familiar with Wilbur but I believe it doesn't run well with large files (never mind super massive files like that). I've really only used Wilbur once or twice, but I think even around 4000 px (I think, can't really remember, maybe it was bigger) and Wilbur was crashing.

But if you get it to work that would be a truly epic product!! I'm really curious to see it!!  :Very Happy:

----------


## waldronate

The 64-bit version should be able to handle large file sizes. The 32-bit version is much more limited as Josiah describes.

----------


## johnvanvliet

> 10200x6600 pixel image


good size but it is NOT



> That is a massive image... very massive.


right now i am working on a *SMALL!!!* rgb map of Mercury ( the planet) and it is 23,040 x 11,520 

this is just the color layer for the 256 ppd map 92,160x 46,080 px image that comes next 

and that is not even the largest i have worked on 


suggestions 

first i am guessing this will have a few continents  
use qgis or mmps to remap them from Mercator or simple cylindrical to "stereographic" centered on the one continent you are working on 
use wilbur to eroid and remap back to the format of the full map

----------


## arsheesh

> So I've decided to try an experiment with this technique: a poster-sized map. I'm going for a 10200x6600 pixel image, which I intend to print on a 22x34 inch poster at 300 dpi. This is about 8 times the size of the largest maps I've made to date. I'm up to the point where I'm placing mountains. I'm having no stability issues so far with GIMP, though the file size is growing quite fast (500 MB and climbing). Swapping layers and running filters takes longer, but the commands are working. I'm curious to see how WILBUR handles it.
> 
> Any suggestions and/or adjustments to the tutorial that you'd recommend? I'm thinking that when I get to WILBUR, I should cut the percentage noise to 0.5% or so. I'm also trying to keep the layer count in GIMP as low as I can.


I've never worked with an image that large before so I'm just going to defer to Waldronate here.  Best of luck though, I'm really curious how it will turn out.

Cheers,
-Arsheesh

----------


## ludgarthewarwolf

> So I've decided to try an experiment with this technique: a poster-sized map. I'm going for a 10200x6600 pixel image, which I intend to print on a 22x34 inch poster at 300 dpi. This is about 8 times the size of the largest maps I've made to date. I'm up to the point where I'm placing mountains. I'm having no stability issues so far with GIMP, though the file size is growing quite fast (500 MB and climbing). Swapping layers and running filters takes longer, but the commands are working. I'm curious to see how WILBUR handles it.
> 
> Any suggestions and/or adjustments to the tutorial that you'd recommend? I'm thinking that when I get to WILBUR, I should cut the percentage noise to 0.5% or so. I'm also trying to keep the layer count in GIMP as low as I can.


I'm trying something similar to this myself, though on a much smaller scale. I'd suggest doing sections of the map at a time. I split my map into 3 continents, and I'm making each chain of mountains apart to limit the strain on WILBUR and GIMP.

----------


## Coriolis

My initial land sculpt is done, and I'm trying my first pass through WILBUR right now. As I suspected, WILBUR is a bit slow, and I'm experimenting with the settings a bit. 0.5% noise is still a touch grainy for a map this big. My machine takes a couple of minutes to do precipitation passes and basin filling, but I'm having no stability issues with GIMP or WILBUR so far. Incise flow in WILBUR takes quite a while to load up (30-40 minutes), but it looks like this might actually work!

----------


## DrakeHawk14

Thank you so much Arsheesh! This is exactly what I've wanted for awhile. Luckily I noticed somebody who made it with this method and he pointed me in the right direction.

Here's the fruit of my labor. I skipped the land glow because I felt like I didn't need it and it was giving me trouble anyway. Feel free to tell me how I did!

----------


## arsheesh

> Thank you so much Arsheesh! This is exactly what I've wanted for awhile. Luckily I noticed somebody who made it with this method and he pointed me in the right direction.
> 
> Here's the fruit of my labor. I skipped the land glow because I felt like I didn't need it and it was giving me trouble anyway. Feel free to tell me how I did!


My pleasure DrakeHawk14, glad you found the tutorial useful.  That is a very serviceable first map.  Everything looks to be in order to me.  About the only suggestion I'd make is a stylistic one: I think the climate zones might benefit from a bit more gradual blending.  Otherwise great work.

Cheers,
-Arsheesh

----------


## gocrew

arsheesh, that map looks absolutely amazing! Your tutorial is just what I am looking for! My only problem is that I cannot open the ggr files of your tutorial. I did a search and it says ggr is a GIMP file, and I have GIMP 2.8 but they won't open for me. I'm not sure what the issue is. Is there another way to get your tutorial? Or is there a simple way to get those files open? Thanks for any help!

----------


## johnvanvliet

you do not "open" gradient files 
you place them in the gradient folder for your user 

have you even read the gimp user guild ? 
-- the English language 
http://docs.gimp.org/2.8/en/

for others
http://www.gimp.org/docs/

----------


## Coriolis

As an update to the poster-size map: the image overall is coming along nicely. I've got the terrain sculpted, and although I don't feel great about my color gradients, they're drafted. Here are a few interesting limitations I've bumped into:

Stability hasn't been a problem yet for GIMP or WILBUR, though a few quirks have popped up. The file size for my land sculpt is a little over 2 GB, but when I have it open and am editing it, the bottom of my GIMP window reports a larger file size (the RAM it's using, perhaps?). When this size gets over 9GB, I can't save the .xcf file until I delete some layers and reduce it below 9GB (there's plenty of space on my hard drive). Routine operations in GIMP are a bit sluggish, and WILBUR takes a painful amount of time to do erosion effects, especially incise flow and erosion cycle.

The output jpg file is 45 MB, which Photobucket doesn't seem to accept, despite their claims to having no upper limit (The uploading bar fills up, but it claims the upload failed after 10 minutes). I have to shrink it down to about a quarter of its size to post it on Photobucket or email it on Hotmail. I haven't tried using my gmail account for it yet.

Gaussian Blur doesn't work so well at this size. I tried using it to soften some of the land textures in prairie areas. It did the job, sort of, but when I did my bump mapping, it gave the terrain a terraced look, which wasn't what I was really looking for. The smudge tool didn't work well either due to the large brush size I had to use; it also produced some small linear jumps that show up in the bump map. Running the blurred image through WILBUR's precipitation-based erosion about 10 times made these problems better, but didn't entirely eliminate the issue.

All in all, however, the process seems to be working. Here's a 1/4 size of the image; please feel free to point out any issues, especially with the colors (I have a color vision deficiency which sometimes makes it hard for me to apply and balance color gradients the right way). There are two areas in the map that are desaturated of color, one in the water and one on land. That's deliberate.

----------


## Falconius

It looks pretty good.  Not sure whats up with the saving issues in GIMP, is there still such a thing as "virtual memory" you could turn on in Windows?  9 GB is kind of enormous though.

To help with the terracing issues and other height issues in Wilbur I found that along with erosion tools, "Remap Altitudes" (in filter>other) was one of the most used features.

----------


## johnvanvliet

the file size increasing in the bottom left  is the undoes and history

----------


## arsheesh

> arsheesh, that map looks absolutely amazing! Your tutorial is just what I am looking for! My only problem is that I cannot open the ggr files of your tutorial. I did a search and it says ggr is a GIMP file, and I have GIMP 2.8 but they won't open for me. I'm not sure what the issue is. Is there another way to get your tutorial? Or is there a simple way to get those files open? Thanks for any help!


Hi gocrew, sorry for the late reply, I've been away from the Guild for a spell (busy Summer).  johnvanvliet is correct, the ggr file is meant to be placed in the the Gradient folder for GIMP.  Once you've done this restart GIMP and you should see the new Gradient appear in your gradients docker.  




> As an update to the poster-size map: the image overall is coming along nicely. I've got the terrain sculpted, and although I don't feel great about my color gradients, they're drafted. Here are a few interesting limitations I've bumped into:
> 
> Stability hasn't been a problem yet for GIMP or WILBUR, though a few quirks have popped up. The file size for my land sculpt is a little over 2 GB, but when I have it open and am editing it, the bottom of my GIMP window reports a larger file size (the RAM it's using, perhaps?). When this size gets over 9GB, I can't save the .xcf file until I delete some layers and reduce it below 9GB (there's plenty of space on my hard drive). Routine operations in GIMP are a bit sluggish, and WILBUR takes a painful amount of time to do erosion effects, especially incise flow and erosion cycle.
> 
> The output jpg file is 45 MB, which Photobucket doesn't seem to accept, despite their claims to having no upper limit (The uploading bar fills up, but it claims the upload failed after 10 minutes). I have to shrink it down to about a quarter of its size to post it on Photobucket or email it on Hotmail. I haven't tried using my gmail account for it yet.
> 
> Gaussian Blur doesn't work so well at this size. I tried using it to soften some of the land textures in prairie areas. It did the job, sort of, but when I did my bump mapping, it gave the terrain a terraced look, which wasn't what I was really looking for. The smudge tool didn't work well either due to the large brush size I had to use; it also produced some small linear jumps that show up in the bump map. Running the blurred image through WILBUR's precipitation-based erosion about 10 times made these problems better, but didn't entirely eliminate the issue.
> 
> All in all, however, the process seems to be working. Here's a 1/4 size of the image; please feel free to point out any issues, especially with the colors (I have a color vision deficiency which sometimes makes it hard for me to apply and balance color gradients the right way). There are two areas in the map that are desaturated of color, one in the water and one on land. That's deliberate.


Thanks for the updates on how this project is going Coriolis.  As it happens, I've recently had the opportunity to test out large files in GIMP myself.  I'm working on a commission for a client that is sized at 10000x10000px (the file, not the client mind you  :Wink: ).  My old lap-top wouldn't have been able to handle a map of this size, but recently I purchased a computer with a good sized hard drive, loads of RAM and a good graphics card.  What I'm finding is that while Wilbur is capable of handling a file this size (though it is incredibly slow), I experiencing a lot of performance issues with GIMP.  Not only are the filters extremely slow, but I'm experiencing frequent crashes, especially if the file contains more than 5 layers.  It's a bit frustrating actually, literally about half the time spent on this project has been been dealing with these performance issues.  Well, now I know.  I won't be taking on a commission this sized in the future.

Cheers,
-Arsheesh

----------


## GeriiSetiawan

i will try it, it's amazing tutorial .. thanks  :Smile:

----------


## Coriolis

Arsheesh, any ideas or tips on how I might go about making cliffs or mesas with this technique? I've tried doing some before with a simple sharply-defined lighter area in the height map, and it didn't work out well.

----------


## Lord Aenaran

Hail, Arsheesh. This tutorial is truly a wonder to our GIMP civilization. I have question regarding to this.

1. Does the tutorial create landmasses randomly? If so, please tell me (I am still wondering) how to create specified lands by using or following the tutorial?

2. Is the 'Difference Clouds 1' that described in the manual page 2 same as 'Difference 1'? I am confused with that.

I think that's all. Thanks.

----------


## Freodin

> Hail, Arsheesh. This tutorial is truly a wonder to our GIMP civilization. I have question regarding to this.
> 
> 1. Does the tutorial create landmasses randomly? If so, please tell me (I am still wondering) how to create specified lands by using or following the tutorial?


No, you need to do that on your own. Either use your creativity, or look at some of the other tutorials here on the forum that deal with creating random or semi-random landmasses.




> 2. Is the 'Difference Clouds 1' that described in the manual page 2 same as 'Difference 1'? I am confused with that.
> 
> I think that's all. Thanks.


Seems so. I guess Arsheesh was just too lazy to type out "clouds" every time. But as the tut never explicitly tells you to create any layers called "Difference 1", the "Difference Clouds 1" layer is the only available option.

----------


## arsheesh

Hi everyone, sorry for the late replies, I've been away for a bit and didn't see these till just now.

@Coriolis: that is a very good question and one I'm afraid I don't know the answer to.  Waldronate, the creator of Wilbur would be the person to talk to about this.  My experience has been that Wilbur tends to place lakes and such in any large flat areas.  If you wish to keep these areas flat one thing you might try is to replace the post-Wilbur-height-map interior section of the mesa with the pre-Wilbur-height-map.  That would get rid of all of the drainage areas within the mesa.

@Lord Aenaran: as for the first question, Freodin is correct: I don't discuss creating a map outline in the Eriond tutorial.  However the question has come up a few times so I did create a quick walkthrough of how to do this over at my blog (you can find it here). 

As for the second question, yup, those are the same layers, it's just that the terminology is inconsistent (my mistake).

Cheers,
-Arsheesh

----------


## Lord Aenaran

@Freodin; Oh yes. Silly me... ahh.... nevermind. Thanks.

@Arsheesh; Oh yes, I see that.... O' my Lord..... Thanks, too.

@All; I don't know what to say...

----------


## Dwalus

Amazing tutorial! I must say it's my favorite on this site (and I spent hours searching through all those I could find) and definitely among the most well-made tutorials I've seen. However, I've unfortunately not been able to edit the gradients in GIMP correctly. When I try to adjust the little triangles in the gradient edit window it simply doesn't let me interact with anything. I know I'm in the right spot since when I hover over the arrow/triangle things it shows a little tool tip that says click to drag. Any suggestions? Hopefully I'm just missing something obvious here.

Here's my progress so far.

----------


## johnvanvliet

considering that gimp2.8 has a VERY different gui( it is almost a full rewrite of the base code to move away from gtk to GEGL )

right click on the hash marks that make up where the triangles used to be  


and use the menu

----------


## arsheesh

> Amazing tutorial! I must say it's my favorite on this site (and I spent hours searching through all those I could find) and definitely among the most well-made tutorials I've seen. However, I've unfortunately not been able to edit the gradients in GIMP correctly. When I try to adjust the little triangles in the gradient edit window it simply doesn't let me interact with anything. I know I'm in the right spot since when I hover over the arrow/triangle things it shows a little tool tip that says click to drag. Any suggestions? Hopefully I'm just missing something obvious here.
> 
> Here's my progress so far.


Hi Dwalus, I'm really glad to here my tutorials has been of use to you!  Thanks for the kind feedback.  Hmm, I'm afraid I'm not sure what glitch is preventing you from being able to edit the gradients, let alone how to fix it.  It's possible this might be a bug affecting a particular version of the program.  May I ask what version of GIMP you are using?  Also, this will probably sound like a dumb question but have you tried restarting the program?  I've found that some glitches are only temporary and can be resolved by a restart.  I ran a quick Google search to see if I could find any other references to this problem on GIMP forums but nothing came up.  If the problem persists even after a restart you might try your luck with GIMP Chat.  There are a lot of people far more knowledgeable about GIMP than I am on this forum.

The map so far is looking pretty good, even without being able to edit the gradients.  The only thing that looks off to me is the water, which looks black on my monitor.  The ocean color in the original gradient should be dark blue.  The fact that the ocean appears black might be due to a failure to properly mask the ocean area in layers above the gradient layer.  For instance you might want to check to see whether the layer mask on your bump map layers (i.e. land and mountain bumps) is set to mask the area covering the ocean on those layers.  Otherwise great job so far!

Cheers,
-Arsheesh

----------


## arsheesh

> considering that gimp2.8 has a VERY different gui( it is almost a full rewrite of the base code to move away from gtk to GEGL )
> 
> right click on the hash marks that make up where the triangles used to be  
> 
> 
> and use the menu


Ha, now that's something I didn't know about johnvanvliet.  Thanks for the assist!

----------


## Dracozard

I absolutely love the tutorial. But as a complete novice I am a bit uncertain what to do in the "Creating Additional Layers Masks" section. What am I supposed to be selecting here exactly?

----------


## arsheesh

> I absolutely love the tutorial. But as a complete novice I am a bit uncertain what to do in the "Creating Additional Layers Masks" section. What am I supposed to be selecting here exactly?


Hi Dracozard, glad to here it!  To create a layer mask on a layer right click on the layer and a popup window will appear which offers a host of functions.  About midway down there is an option to "Add Layer Mask" (see image).  Click it and a new pop up window will appear.  Select the default "White (full opacity)", hit OK and a layer mask will appear just to the right of the layer.  When you want to work on the mask you must first make sure that it, not the layer, is selected.  To do this simply left-click on the mask and a white bounding box will surround it rather than the layer.  When you want to work on the layer again just left-click on the layer.  Hope that helped.

Cheers,
-Arsheesh

----------


## Xuixien

I'm stuck at the mountains/airbrushing part. Can someone explain it to me? This is where I'm at so far: http://i.imgur.com/neG70ur.png I just can't get the mountains to blend in. Should I erase them a bit and make them narrower? How long should the shading take? I feel like with 3% opacity I have to stroke the same tiny area 20 times before I notice a change.

----------


## arsheesh

> I'm stuck at the mountains/airbrushing part. Can someone explain it to me? This is where I'm at so far: http://i.imgur.com/neG70ur.png I just can't get the mountains to blend in. Should I erase them a bit and make them narrower? How long should the shading take? I feel like with 3% opacity I have to stroke the same tiny area 20 times before I notice a change.


Hi Xuixien.  Don't despair, this is the most time consuming part of this tutorial; it's not just you.  However there are a couple of ways you can use to help speed up the process.

First, since writing this tutorial I've discovered a handy little trick to cutting down on the amount of erasing needed on the mountain clouds layer.  If you take the select by color tool and select any transparent pixels on the mountain clouds layer (i.e. anywhere where there aren't any clouds) this will create a selection of everything but those clouds.  Now if you feather the selection (Select > Feather) by say 10-30 px or so, depending on the size of your map, and then click "delete" this will fade the perimeter of our clouds, effectively getting rid of any hard edges.  You will still need to do some spot erasing and blending but this trick will save you a lot of time.

Second, beyond just erasing the mountain clouds layer remember to to also airbrush the land clouds layer below it.  This will help to make the transition between the two layers appear seamless.  In my own workflow I often go back and forth between erasing and airbrushing until I can't tell where one layer ends and the other begins.  It looks to me like you've started the air brushing process but have only focused on the area directly beneath the mountain clouds.  It's worth pointing out is that as in painting you want to begin with broad brush strokes, gradually building up the height of the areas surrounding the mountains (e.g. the foothills) before moving in with a smaller brush to sort out the finer details of blending.  This will help the transition from lowlands to highlands to mountains appear smooth and gradual.

Hope that helps.

Cheers,
-Arsheesh

----------


## Xuixien

> Hi Xuixien.  Don't despair, this is the most time consuming part of this tutorial; it's not just you.  However there are a couple of ways you can use to help speed up the process.
> 
> First, since writing this tutorial I've discovered a handy little trick to cutting down on the amount of erasing needed on the mountain clouds layer.  If you take the select by color tool and select any transparent pixels on the mountain clouds layer (i.e. anywhere where there aren't any clouds) this will create a selection of everything but those clouds.  Now if you feather the selection (Select > Feather) by say 10-30 px or so, depending on the size of your map, and then click "delete" this will fade the perimeter of our clouds, effectively getting rid of any hard edges.  You will still need to do some spot erasing and blending but this trick will save you a lot of time.
> 
> Second, beyond just erasing the mountain clouds layer remember to to also airbrush the land clouds layer below it.  This will help to make the transition between the two layers appear seamless.  In my own workflow I often go back and forth between erasing and airbrushing until I can't tell where one layer ends and the other begins.  It looks to me like you've started the air brushing process but have only focused on the area directly beneath the mountain clouds.  It's worth pointing out is that as in painting you want to begin with broad brush strokes, gradually building up the height of the areas surrounding the mountains (e.g. the foothills) before moving in with a smaller brush to sort out the finer details of blending.  This will help the transition from lowlands to highlands to mountains appear smooth and gradual.
> 
> Hope that helps.
> 
> Cheers,
> -Arsheesh


How do I select the right brush type (hardness, size, etc)? Is that something that just comes from experience?

----------


## johnvanvliet

gimp 2.8.18 
is a VERY different tool under the hood than 2.4 or 2.6 WERE

a near 100% NEW software rewrite using GEGL  instead of the " Gimp Tool Kit" (GTK )

you do NOT select

you use the sliders right there in front of you on the toolbox

----------


## Xuixien

> gimp 2.8.18 
> is a VERY different tool under the hood than 2.4 or 2.6 WERE
> 
> a near 100% NEW software rewrite using GEGL  instead of the " Gimp Tool Kit" (GTK )
> 
> you do NOT select
> 
> you use the sliders right there in front of you on the toolbox


Huh? What do you mean?

----------


## jimydog000

I finally got it finished, some parts were painful particuaraly the mountain airbrushing and incise flow. I'm pleased with it though.

----------


## Voolf

Hey arsheesh

I have been trying this tut receantly but have encounter a problem. When i want to select rivers in Gimp (after importing png from wilbur) I can not do that perfectly. I mean, i have to play more with the treshold of magic wand (because 15 dosent work nicely). But whatever i pick i can never select ALL rivers. I guess the problem is that they are all different grey. Also all rivers are 1-pixel wide. Is it important to grab WHOLE length of river, or just part of them ?

Thanks

BTW. I stopped on the rivers now, but so far, very nice tut, and i have so much fun working with Wilbur  :Smile:  (like a kid playing with new toy, haha)

----------


## TheLonelyWolfie

Hiya! Sorry to respond to an old thread but it still seems decently alive. So far this has been a pretty amazing tutorial, but I've gotten stuck on a part. when I try the color curve for the mountains layer, nothing happens. I'm not sure if I messed up somewhere with my layers but you've got me on this one. (could just be my art skills aren't that great) I'm pretty sure I've done well at following all the prior instructions, just not sure why this isn't correct. (doesn't show the mountainy outline in the color line menu either as you can see). the mountains layer is transparent with mountains posted in, and it was selected before I used the color line tool, just for reference. (also, tips on how it's going so far are welcome)

----------


## Lewellyn

Thanks, Arsheesh, for the tutorial. As soon as I'm allowed to I will check it out.  :Smile:  I hope it won't take so long 'cause I'm literally like a cat on hot bricks. xD

----------


## DM_Zandak

Definitely going to try this now! Thank you!

----------


## Dibyo Dutta

Hey there! Thanks for this wonderful tutorial. It allowed me to make my first ever map.
Here it is:

I know it's not the best map in the world, but it's my first nonetheless (consoling myself :Crying or Very sad: )
I wanted to make it look like the map of a much smaller area, so I tried to make the rivers appear bigger (wider). That made it a whole lot uglier.
Also, I put in way too many rivers (over-did it).
Also, the mountains could have been bigger and at the top, what looks like a frozen lake - I wanted that to be a crater.
But, hey, I managed to pull something off (again consoling myself :Crying or Very sad: ).
Anyway, thanks a bunch for the tutorial and thought you guys should be the first to see my first map in the long list of upcoming ones.
Take care and see you all soon.

----------


## arsheesh

Sorry for the very late reply everyone, my participation here at the Guild has dwindled over the last couple of years due to increased responsibilities at home. 




> Hey arsheesh
> 
> I have been trying this tut receantly but have encounter a problem. When i want to select rivers in Gimp (after importing png from wilbur) I can not do that perfectly. I mean, i have to play more with the treshold of magic wand (because 15 dosent work nicely). But whatever i pick i can never select ALL rivers. I guess the problem is that they are all different grey. Also all rivers are 1-pixel wide. Is it important to grab WHOLE length of river, or just part of them ?
> 
> Thanks
> 
> BTW. I stopped on the rivers now, but so far, very nice tut, and i have so much fun working with Wilbur  (like a kid playing with new toy, haha)


Hi Voolf, yes, you've correctly identified the issue.  I was never really satisfied with this technique either due to the issues you raise.  Waldronate once suggested a different method to me.  In Wilbur you can use the River Flow filter (Texture > Other Maps > River Flow) to isolate just the rivers onto their own height map.  On the pop-up menu that appears check the box for use solid background color (which should be black by default).  The image should now be black except for your rivers.  Now change the color of "River Mouth" to white and the color of the "River Source" to a mid grey tone (you can also play around with the sliders till you get the amount of river branching you desire); this will give you a nice gradient that can be used in the next step.  Next go ahead and export this as a .png file and then open this as a new image in GIMP.  Next, on your GIMP map file create a new "Rivers" layer (above your previous layers) and fill the entire layer with the color you wish your rivers to be.  Following this, create a layer mask for this new layer.  Now go ahead and copy the B&W river height map you just opened and paste it into the layer mask of your newly created Rivers layer.  That's it; you should now have colored rivers.




> Hiya! Sorry to respond to an old thread but it still seems decently alive. So far this has been a pretty amazing tutorial, but I've gotten stuck on a part. when I try the color curve for the mountains layer, nothing happens. I'm not sure if I messed up somewhere with my layers but you've got me on this one. (could just be my art skills aren't that great) I'm pretty sure I've done well at following all the prior instructions, just not sure why this isn't correct. (doesn't show the mountainy outline in the color line menu either as you can see). the mountains layer is transparent with mountains posted in, and it was selected before I used the color line tool, just for reference. (also, tips on how it's going so far are welcome)


Huh, that is very odd indeed.  I'm trying to think of what might caused this, but I'm coming up empty here.  So long as that layer was selected the curves should be operating on that layer.  I'm sorry to not be of much help to you here but I just dunno what the trouble is.




> Hey there! Thanks for this wonderful tutorial. It allowed me to make my first ever map.
> Here it is:
> 
> I know it's not the best map in the world, but it's my first nonetheless (consoling myself)
> I wanted to make it look like the map of a much smaller area, so I tried to make the rivers appear bigger (wider). That made it a whole lot uglier.
> Also, I put in way too many rivers (over-did it).
> Also, the mountains could have been bigger and at the top, what looks like a frozen lake - I wanted that to be a crater.
> But, hey, I managed to pull something off (again consoling myself).
> Anyway, thanks a bunch for the tutorial and thought you guys should be the first to see my first map in the long list of upcoming ones.
> Take care and see you all soon.


Hey that's pretty good for a first effort!  You've pointed out some areas that could be improved, but that all comes with practice.  The more you play with the technique the more you'll develop a knack for this sort of stuff.  Thanks for posting!

Cheers,
-Arsheesh

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## Tonquani

Hey Arsheesh, what a brilliant tutorial.  I have just worked through it in a couple of hours and came up with this:



Not pefect by any means, but I'll definitely take it - it's an order of magnitude better than any of my previous attempts.

Have some rep!

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## arsheesh

Not perfect but not bad at all for a first attempt.  Imagine what this might look like once you are more familiar with the techniques.  

Cheers,
-Arsheesh

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## Candacis

> Tried doing this in Photoshop CS6... It ended up not going well
> 
> The Mountain Difference Cloud layer is near impossible to make 
> The Masking options are different and as a result the masking portions don't work... which is a lot of it. I got to trying to sculp mountains and I couldn't get it to look well.
> I'm pretty sure the Land type layers would work, but from what I have seen GIMP's airbrush is better or something about Photoshop is making it hard to get it right.


I just started this tutorial with photoshop. Here is my progress for it:

New Layer, then Filter > Render > Clouds, then on the same layer Filter > Render > Difference Clouds
Repeat this with a second layer. Set the layer mode of the second layer to Linear Dodge. Select all and use Copy Merged, then paste, to get a new layer. Use Invert on it. Set Opacity to 90%, again select all, use copy merged, then paste and you should have a Mountain Clouds layer that is pretty close to the ones made in GIMP.

I used Land Clouds out of GIMP, because I liked them better, but I'm sure you can get a same result in photoshop. I also made 2 land cloud layers and I used a mask on the top land cloud layer. With a soft brush I went over that mask to blend those two land cloud layers together. I just did this for some options regarding my terrain. I liked some stuff in one layer and some in the other.

For the sculpting (after I had cut and placed all my mountains) I used a soft brush (0% hardness) as eraser, 35% opacity, 12px (my image is 4000x2000). I only used this brush for any mountain layers that overlapped each other and needed to be blended. Sometimes I drew a greyish color on the layer underneath, if I erased too much. Then I merged all mountain layers. I also ctrl + left clicked the thumbnail layer image of my map to get a selection of my landmasses, then inverted the selection and used this to delete any mountains on the mountain layer that were over the oceans.
Now I copyied this layer, just for safekeeping.

After that I ctrl + left clicked the thumbnail layer image of my mountain layer and used modify selection > feather (with 5 px), I inverted the selection and deleted that part. Again, I select all mountains, I use modify > contract (with 5 px) to make the selection smaller, I invert it and use modify > feather (5 px), and delete it. After that, you should have a pretty smooth mountain layer. The pixel amount can vary depending on what size your image is. The smaller the image, the smaller your feather amount should be. (I forgot, now would be time to use the gradiation curve, like in the tutorial.)
I use my eraser brush (same settings) to erase any left over weird spots, like all the black spots inside mountains etc.

Now I make a new layer on top of the mountain layer, I set opacity to 60% and layer mode to linear dodge. I use a brush with 33px, 20% hardness, 20% opacity, color: #878787 (or whatever fits your medium map color).
I use the toning brush (the 3rd one) from this set: https://www.deviantart.com/pearlpenc...2014-442921937
But I'm sure the standard photoshop brush is fine enough.
Now I gently paint around the edges of the mountain to make to blend them into their surroundings. At this stage you can sometimes spot some left over hard edges on the mountain layer, so I go over this one last time with the eraser here and there.

That's my progress so far. I'm not sure, if this will even get me a nice result in the later steps of the tutorial, but that's how far I got yet. Here is my result so far:



I'm not sure, if my mountain placement even makes sense and if it is too much or not.

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## Azélor

Are you aware that you've cut the poles?

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## Candacis

What do you mean by that?

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## BetterThanNever

I've been using this tutorial for a while, and I'm loving it. Right now I'm at the gradient-spraying stage.

But not that I've gotten this far, I've noticed a problem with my map. I have way too many basins for my liking. I'll likely make some of them into lakes, but I'd like to add some new elevation to some of them.

I don't really mind if the additions are applied to the Temperate Gradient, I just want to edit the bump map so it fits better, do you know of a way to do this without mucking up my process?

I appreciate any help that I receive!

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## Candacis

So, I figured out what you meant with the poles, I think and put them in:



I don't know how this will look in wilbur or if the placement of the mountains is okay, but that is probably a topic for another thread.

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## Azélor

It's better like that. There is still a black border but it's just a matter of taste.

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## Candacis

Oh, yeah, I left the black border for now, because I probably want to make something there, not sure yet. But, of course, it is not part of the map.
Thanks for the feedback with the poles  :Smile:

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## Wertoiuy

I am working through this tutorial. I have just finished with the Wilbur section, and am starting on the Bump Map section. I couldn't get Wilbur to make a lake in the bottom left valley, so I figured I would add that later. 
However, I cannot get GIMP to select just the rivers like he does in the tutorial. If I click towards the bottom of the rivers, it only selects up to that point. If I click further and further up it starts to highlight the entire coast, which I don't want either. 
I can clearly tell where there are rivers and where there are not, so how do I get the program to do so?

----------


## arsheesh

> I am working through this tutorial. I have just finished with the Wilbur section, and am starting on the Bump Map section. I couldn't get Wilbur to make a lake in the bottom left valley, so I figured I would add that later. 
> However, I cannot get GIMP to select just the rivers like he does in the tutorial. If I click towards the bottom of the rivers, it only selects up to that point. If I click further and further up it starts to highlight the entire coast, which I don't want either. 
> I can clearly tell where there are rivers and where there are not, so how do I get the program to do so?


Yes, this is a problem with the selection method I outlined in the tutorial: it only works up to a certain point.  Another method which offers more precision is to create a separate (non-visible) layer which contains only the rivers.  When you wish to make a river selection you can make this layer visible and use the select by color tool on the rivers.  So how do you get this rivers layer?  Well for that you need to load your height map back into wilbur, run "Fill Basins" (Filter > Fill > Fill Basins), and then apply the "River Flow" texture (Texture > Other Maps > River Flow).  A popup menu will appear which allows you to select the color of the start and end points of the river (you will want to select dark grey and light grey for these) and adjust, via slider, the river length to be shown.  You will also need to select the "Use Solid Background" box (which should be set to black by default).  Click "OK" and this will output a Height map of just the rivers.  Export this (as a textur .png file) to whatever map folder you are using for this project and then import it as a layer to GIMP.  Voila.

Cheers,
-Arsheesh

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## Squessibionaro

Hi. I used your tutorial earlier this week and I loved it, I'm hoping in the future to use it to build a world for my pathfinder campaign (I may alter the gradients a little to fit my own color palette tastes). I had a question however, I'm fairly experienced in gimp so i found the gimp tutorial fun and easy enough to follow but the Wilbur side of things I had some issues. I had a handful of lakes (morel like Large seas I would suppose) inside my continents and when I went to use the "Fill basins" tool it ended up filling in these sections as well, which I did not like. 

As a forced solution I simply made sure the lakes were not selected when applying fill basins, but was wondering what i could do to avoid this in the future (if anything?). I'm at work at the moment and had some spare time to post but that also means i don't have my map to show off.

Thanks for your awesome tutorial and time spent reading this response!

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## arsheesh

Hello Squessibionaro, Waldronate (the creator of Wilbur) may know how to address this question better than I, but what I usually do when I have lakes I want to preserve is to load a selection into Wilbur that basically masks out the areas that you don't want Wilbur to opperate on.  To do this you'll need to create a two-tone B&W version of your maps where Black = water (and includes any lakes) and White = land.  Save this layer as a separate .png file (Named "Selection" or some such) to whatever map folder you are using for this project.  Now load your height map back into Wilbur.  Once you've done this go to Select > Load Selection and navigate to the appropriate map folder and select the "Selection" file.  You should now see marching ants along the contours of the land.  Now any filters you use in Wilber will only be applied to the land itself.  Note that you may have to turn this selection off to perform some functions and then reload it once more.  Hope that was helpful.

Cheers,
-Arsheesh

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## Squessibionaro

Thanks, I think i'll give that method a shot once I am off work and able to give mapping another go! (I try to make a map, albeit a low quality map with my low level of experience, every couple of days since joining so i can improve).

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## Tyler Carrigan

Hello Arsheesh and anybody else who might happen upon this. As I'm getting (back?) into mapmaking after a brief foray into it years ago, I've been following along with the splendid tutorial that you have provided. It has been relatively clear and concise, easy to follow along with. I spent several hours on the 'tear' stage of the map, airbrushing to smooth things over, and admittedly rushed through it towards the end to move on, as I'm looking to follow this process a time or two, and others as well, to expose myself to techniques. 

I am running into an issue though, with the rivers, and making them in Wilbur. The problem is that no matter what I do, rivers refuse to accept the ocean as an ocean, and demand to spawn there. This goes for both the incise flow and the river map mode. I thought of a potential work around, that is, to increase the length of the rivers generated by the river map mode so that they appear more or less as desired on the actual landmasses. Then, I'd move it into GIMP, use the coastline channel as my selection, invert selection, and delete everything else, aka, the rivers that are "outside" the coastline. But I'd still love to understand why this issue is happening. Also, when I set the pre-blur 0.5, as recommend for working with larger maps (I'm working with a 2500 x 5000 image), the landmasses go grey. Example images to help show what is happening are provided. 

If you need more details, or have other questions/recommendations before being able to assist, don't hesitate to ask. Any advice or solutions that can be provided would be appreciated as well.  :Smile:

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## waldronate

Wilbur doesn't really have a notion of "ocean". There is a break in the coloring scheme that can make things look like an ocean and some things (like exponent) allow a breakpoint that can simulate something reminiscent of an ocean, but there isn't really an "ocean" as such in Wilbur. What you have in Wilbur is a grayscale image that is used to produce some funny coloring.

The incise flow operation does a connectivity analysis on the whole surface and the removes an amount from each point on the surface proportional to the connectivity of that point. Unless you have a selection that prevents the removal in an area, Wilbur will do this operation to the entire surface. The find rivers operation does the same calculations as Incise Flow, but instead of affecting altitude, it dirties up the pixels in the display texture ("River Length" is exactly analogous to "Flow Exponent").

http://www.fracterra.com/FunWithWilburVol5/index.html shows one way to get lakes and rivers onto the same Wilbur image using an external image editor.

Your landmasses "went gray" because you're using a flow exponent of 6.5, which will give huge negative values in that single black river that you see on your image. When the lighting calculation does its work, it finds the minimum and maximum altitudes on your map and tries to get both of those extremes  onto the color map. Because you minimum value is very deep, most of the pixels on the map end up in the highest portions of the display, which is colored white (shades of gray when lighted). I recommend a flow exponent between 0 and 1 for most cases (the default exponent is 2/3, which gives a useful value for common cases; smaller values give longer "river canyons").

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## Wertoiuy

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?

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## Thorijel

Hi,

So I am using this tutorial and am now at the step "tears". 

It says to use the 3% airbrush and painfully mesh the mountains with the rest of the maps.

However, how long is that step going to take. I spend some time on it and saw no progress. I just want to have an idea of the time to spend here, as I want to be sure I'm doing things right.

Thanks for the tutorial.

----------


## Thorijel

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.

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## Coriolis

> 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.


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%.

----------


## Deeds

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).

----------


## 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.

----------


## Fynnarius

Hey,
first of all, thank you for your fantastic tutorial(s), but I've been getting weird results when applying the landmass-layer mask, during "Isolating the land" on page 3. My Layer is far darker than what is shown in the pdf and playing with brightness and contrast doesn't help much.



Any idea what I could've done wrong?

----------


## arsheesh

> Hey,
> first of all, thank you for your fantastic tutorial(s), but I've been getting weird results when applying the landmass-layer mask, during "Isolating the land" on page 3. My Layer is far darker than what is shown in the pdf and playing with brightness and contrast doesn't help much.
> 
> 
> 
> Any idea what I could've done wrong?


Yeah that does look a bit dark.  This may sound like a silly question, but are you sure that the "brightness/contrast" filter is being applied to the layer rather than the layer mask?  Because in the image you uploaded it almost looks as if the layer mask is what is currently being selected.

----------


## Fynnarius

> Yeah that does look a bit dark.  This may sound like a silly question, but are you sure that the "brightness/contrast" filter is being applied to the layer rather than the layer mask?  Because in the image you uploaded it almost looks as if the layer mask is what is currently being selected.


Thanks for the quick response. That was exactly it. I'm facepalming so hard right now^^' 
Had even downgraded to the old version of Gimp you used when making this tutorial because I wasn't able to figure the problem out...

----------


## arsheesh

> Thanks for the quick response. That was exactly it. I'm facepalming so hard right now^^' 
> Had even downgraded to the old version of Gimp you used when making this tutorial because I wasn't able to figure the problem out...


Ha ha, no worries, there's a big learning curve to GIMP and little things like knowing whether or not a layer or layer mask are selected are very easy to overlook.  Glad to here you got the issue sorted out though.  Cheers.

----------


## fabiocmg

Hello. This is a fantastic Tutorial. I tried with already existing map (The Tagmar Map, a pt-br setting), so I used less the Wilbur to determine rivers and more Gimp, but I'm satisfied with the result until now. Afterall, I'm an amateur!  :Very Happy: 


I would like to add one tip that maybe can be useful for someone:
This site is a good source to copy and paste the mountains, other than create it rendering clouds. To do so, zoom somewhere in the world, print screen the image and create from clipboard in gimp. Then select from it to paste as mountains and hills in the main map.

----------


## Coriolis

Thanks for the link! Using real-life height maps can be enormously helpful and a great time-saver. I modified a height map of the British Isles into a post-apocalyptic map I made a couple of years ago.

----------


## Yul

This tutorial made me come on this forum. Your concept is wonderfull, and Wilbur an amazing software! Thank you for your video, a whole new world is open to me now!

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## arsheesh

> Hello. This is a fantastic Tutorial. I tried with already existing map (The Tagmar Map, a pt-br setting), so I used less the Wilbur to determine rivers and more Gimp, but I'm satisfied with the result until now. Afterall, I'm an amateur!


Nice work fabiocmg.  I'm glad the tutorial was of use to you.




> This tutorial made me come on this forum. Your concept is wonderfull, and Wilbur an amazing software! Thank you for your video, a whole new world is open to me now!


I'm really happy to here that.  However, as of yet I've not made any videos so I was confused for a second.  However a quick Google search shows that it turns out that, unknown to me, Will Erwin over on Youtube made an an interesting adaptation of this using a clever way to generate a height map.  In case anyone is interested in checking that out here is the link to the video.

Cheers,
-Arsheesh

----------


## Coriolis

> Nice work fabiocmg.  I'm glad the tutorial was of use to you.
> 
> 
> 
> I'm really happy to here that.  However, as of yet I've not made any videos so I was confused for a second.  However a quick Google search shows that it turns out that, unknown to me, Will Erwin over on Youtube made an an interesting adaptation of this using a clever way to generate a height map.  In case anyone is interested in checking that out here is the link to the video.
> 
> Cheers,
> -Arsheesh


(Will Erwin here)

I made that video tutorial after someone on DeviantArt asked how I made my astronomy-based maps several years back. Nice to see that it's steering people here to the original technique.

The Eriond technique continues to be at the core of my approach to regional mapping. Although I've done all sorts of variations on it (using modified real height maps, X-ray images, and astronomy images as my baseline height map), and though I've developed my own variations on Arsheesh's steps, the Eriond tutorial remains the best all-around cartography tutorial I've ever seen.

----------


## arsheesh

> (Will Erwin here)
> 
> I made that video tutorial after someone on DeviantArt asked how I made my astronomy-based maps several years back. Nice to see that it's steering people here to the original technique.
> 
> The Eriond technique continues to be at the core of my approach to regional mapping. Although I've done all sorts of variations on it (using modified real height maps, X-ray images, and astronomy images as my baseline height map), and though I've developed my own variations on Arsheesh's steps, the Eriond tutorial remains the best all-around cartography tutorial I've ever seen.


Will, great to here from you again my friend!  That is a very high compliment, thank you.  I've really enjoyed watching over the years how you've taken the techniques in novel directions and carved out your own unique style.  Palladium Games has really benefited from having work from an artist of your caliber.  

Cheers,
-Arsheesh

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## genteelblackhole

This tutorial is so helpful! I made some deviations in bits and I've ended up with an odd halo around all of my mountains after passing them through Wilbur and adding the temperate gradient, so I'll need to work out how to fix this somehow. I'm guessing I have too steep a step in the altitude around them somehow.

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## arsheesh

Glad to here the tutorial was useful to you.  You can also swap out the lime greenish color for a color that better transitions from brown to green to get rid of the halo effect.  I chose that color to add a bit more contrast but it won't work well for some heightmaps.  Nice looking mountains by the way.

Cheers,
-Arsheesh

----------


## Solitus

Thanks for this tutorial! So far it has gone very smoothly; however, I am concerned because my mountain clouds don't look like the picture in the tutorial. They seem rather gray and indistinct, whereas the picture has much darker areas and seems more detailed. I am using a different ratio (1100 pixels by 500). I did adjust the x/y values of the noise to compensate for that though. Here is a picture: https://ibb.co/K5hf2Ty

Any ideas  :Exclamation:

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## willuwontu

Thanks for the tutorial, was looking for a way to map out my world and came across this tutorial on your old website. Not really familiar with Gimp or mapmaking and I rushed a bit towards the end but I think it came out alright.



I'm probably going to end up remaking it, but here's a mix of notes about the tutorial and things for myself so I can grab ideas.
Floodfills are great for setting ocean height in wilbur, helps avoid pesky height differentials.I had no idea what I was doing with the bump maps, I just did a bump map without selecting anything and nothing changed. I'm happy you had a comment about it early on in the thread, and I was able to fix it.I ended up adding a rivers layer, ran a gradient of blues from cold to hot to cold, and used the intersection of land and river masks to restrict it to just the inland waters. I should've taken the time to paint lakes in as well.I couldn't do incise flows in wilbur, but I managed to run erosion cycles, which gave me river-esque things? Seems like a combination of precipitation cycles, incise flow and fill basins to me.I still need to do the land glow at some point.Gotta figure out desert placementsSince it's an equatorial map, I need to figure out how to properly wrap the heightmap so it follows the shape of the lands. (Make masks of selections of continental areas in question, expand canvas, place another copy, make height maps, place copy w/ mask over original map and flatten?)Poles man, I gotta figure out how to do the poles. Some sort of polar conversion so I can work on the polar regions as actual continents?Maybe work on continents in individual files for height maps before reincorporating them into the overall map for coloration? Would help with wrapped continents.Wilbur hates equatorial maps and makes rivers run into the poles instead of away.

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## RobertWinslow

Arsheesh, this is a fantastic tutorial. It showcased some very useful techniques, and the layout was very clear.

Here are a couples maps I made playing around with these techniques:

----------

