Anybody care to share their map?

[Hans]

Is what I would like it to end up as. Maybe not the same colors as they picked, but that general idea is along the lines of what I want.

That map makes heavy uses of customized brushes. For GIMP have a look here: GIMP - Custom Brushes Tutorial Other tools have similar functions.
Maybe someone has already made these brushes for your preferred tool. Just look around a bit. The rest is exercise. Don't expect your first map to be perfect but tray again repeatedly and you will become better.

For the texture experiment with random noise functions. Make them blend out at the layers, so they don't give hard borders. Layer masks can help with that.

Some general remarks: Make the map larger than your result should be. At least double, maybe more. And use lots of layers. Layers are much more easily combined than split.

 

[RainbowGirl]

@Johnny I figured it would. I just had no idea where to begin. Thank you, for showing me that by the way.

@Hans Thank you for the tips. =) Quick question though, what is/does a random noise function do?

 

[Ravana]

Some general remarks: Make the map larger than your result should be. At least double, maybe more. And use lots of layers. Layers are much more easily combined than split.

Since you seem to be the GIMP man hereabouts, and since I'm too lazy to look it up: I have one layer of terrain, including rivers and seacoasts, and am working a second layer involving political boundaries. Is there any way to get it so that if I want to fill political regions (by border), it also reads the rivers/coastlines as "borders", without making them the same layer? (I have thought of one solution–well, two, actually: the second one is to draw "water"-colored borders around all my water features–but I'm hoping there's some easier way.)

Also–and ultimately more importantly for me–is there a way to stop adjacent colors from "bleeding" into one another, when they're on the same layer? GIMP (even Paint) would work fine for my purposes, if it would just stop doing this. Or should I just give up now and start working on a vector map… assuming they won't do that there, too?

 

[Hans]

I'm answering here because it was asked here, but I think we are going a bit off topic now. Moderators feel free to move this to a more appropriate place.

Since you seem to be the GIMP man hereabouts,

I am far from being an artist, but I generally have some basic technical knowledge what can be done with most GIMP functions.

I have one layer of terrain, including rivers and seacoasts, and am working a second layer involving political boundaries. Is there any way to get it so that if I want to fill political regions (by border), it also reads the rivers/coastlines as "borders", without making them the same layer? (I have thought of one solution–well, two, actually: the second one is to draw "water"-colored borders around all my water features–but I'm hoping there's some easier way.)

You can easily create a selection in one layer and use it (for example fill it) in an other layer. Selecting by color should recognize your rivers.
Does that answer your question? If not I blame it on language issues.

Also–and ultimately more importantly for me–is there a way to stop adjacent colors from "bleeding" into one another, when they're on the same layer?

Older versions of GIMP did this by default so I was a bit surprised that this function is so well hidden now. Select->Sharpen should be what you are looking for.

Gimp has some very basic vector functions. Look at paths for that. These are only rudimental when compared to real vector programs, but can be pretty useful.

Quick question though, what is/does a random noise function do?

A random noise function gives you random structures. A simple one would only generate irregularities, dots of different gray values. Other noise functions use fractal algorithms to create cloud like structures, you might want to use one of these functions (e.g. in Gimp Filter->Render->Clouds->Difference Clouds) to create some colorized "dirt" on your map. Make this in a new layer and make that layer nearly transparent to have a texture effect.

 

[Johnny Cosmo]

I'm answering here because it was asked here, but I think we are going a bit off topic now. Moderators feel free to move this to a more appropriate place.

I think it should be fine. At least, I don't mind discussing map-building here too.

 

[RainbowGirl]

A random noise function gives you random structures. A simple one would only generate irregularities, dots of different gray values. Other noise functions use fractal algorithms to create cloud like structures, you might want to use one of these functions (e.g. in Gimp Filter->Render->Clouds->Difference Clouds) to create some colorized "dirt" on your map. Make this in a new layer and make that layer nearly transparent to have a texture effect.

Okay, that makes sense thanks. =)

 

[sashamerideth]

I am thinking with all this aand my planned re-write nagging me that I should make myself a map. Not like one that anyone else will see but a. map I can use to track travel times, plot locations and just generally get a sense of scale.

Need to figure out how many people and therefore how much farmland they will need.

 

[Ravana]

I am far from being an artist, but I generally have some basic technical knowledge what can be done with most GIMP functions.

Puts you way ahead of me. I'm neither an artist nor a "computer person." (And to top it off, all my previous computes were Macs, so I'm still trying to sort out how to do much of anything.…)

You can easily create a selection in one layer and use it (for example fill it) in an other layer. Selecting by color should recognize your rivers.

…and not being either should be apparent from the fact that it didn't occur to me to do this–in spite of the fact that I'm already creating my own brushes for map icons. Worked great. Thanks.

Older versions of GIMP did this by default so I was a bit surprised that this function is so well hidden now. Select->Sharpen should be what you are looking for.

I think the problem was that I wasn't saving the files in GIMP's format (I was saving them as .jpg, which is the least space-consuming of the formats that can be posted here). Haven't noticed it doing this now that I'm saving as .xcf. But it's still good to know where to look if this continues to be problematic. Thanks again.

Now if only I can keep the images as clean once I am ready to post them.…

 

[sashamerideth]

.xcf isn't a lossy compression format like JPEG is. That's part of your bleed, saving in a lossy format.

I am thinking of a bumpmap of random noise, tweaking thresholds and then applying a gradient for water, plains, hilly woodlands and snowy mountains. I'll post here when I have a first iteration that I like.

 

[Johnny Cosmo]

I think the problem was that I wasn't saving the files in GIMP's format (I was saving them as .jpg, which is the least space-consuming of the formats that can be posted here).

Wait, do you mean you're only saving in .jpg? You should keep a copy in the GIMP project format.

 

[Ravana]

Was saving as .jpg only. Not doing it any more. Definitely lossy, even at 100% [sic] fidelity. (Something I'm happy I actually figured out on my own… considering I'm not a computer person. )

Which is really annoying, because there were only two types of objects on these maps. (1) The borders–which the program has to save in terms of exact positions (most of them are a single pixel wide), or else it wouldn't be able to display them later, which it does (albeit with color bleeds…); thus, this data can't be compressed. (2) The fills–which are simply "everything else," as defined by the borders, and which the program has to save in terms of a single color code for each region: this data can't be made any smaller than it already is. In other words, there is no way for the image to be encoded with any less data than it was presented with at save: "compressing" this data actually results in a more complex image than was drawn. A complexity that is perpetuated and expanded with each additional save, as adjacent colors continue to bleed as a result of its compression sampling, which at this point is now sampling colors that didn't exist in the original image.

I can understand why a program might compress a complex, multihued image with numerous adjacent shades and no sharp outlines–a photo, for instance, or a painting. (I'd hate to see what it did to my desktop background: Van Gogh's Starry Night.) It's sloppy coding that it can't detect when an image is already as simple as it can possibly get.

(Some day when I'm really bored, I'm going to create an image with a single pixel of color in the center of a white field, then save it repeatedly as a .jpg at, say, 50% fidelity, just to see how long it takes for the entire image to pick up some shade of that one dot. Stupid program.)

 

[Johnny Cosmo]

I'm pretty sure JPG is geared towards photographs, and GIF and PNG are geared toward more simple images. JPG has more complicated colours, and it sort of 'blends' the image. If you were working with photograph compression, this might be useful to make the loss in detail less noticeable... but since you're using pretty simple colours, GIF or PNG should look better (someone correct me if I'm wrong).

Have you tried using these other formats?

Edit: PNG would probably be the better choice, as GIF can go horribly wrong if you don't limit the original image to 256 colours! Plus, PNG are smaller I think.

 

[sashamerideth]

PNG should be best for maintaining lines as it is the best format for preserving text in images for the web. GIF is indexed so uses a limited pallet of color to save, as well as animation.

 

[Ravana]

May try converting to .png rather than .jpg next time I have something to post. The problem is I always end up wrestling with file sizes: it has to fall within the forum's limits. Oh, well. We'll see what happens.

 

[sashamerideth]

Ravana, there is a free program that can resize to a target file size. Will post again when I can remember it.

For JPEG at least it works best when the height and width are a multiple of 8 or 16 just because of how Tue algorithms work.

 

[Johnny Cosmo]

@Ravana: if it's too hard to meet the forum limits, why not use external image hosting and link to that?

 

[Hans]

PNG would probably be the better choice, as GIF can go horribly wrong if you don't limit the original image to 256 colours! Plus, PNG are smaller I think.

True color PNG is a lot larger than GIF. But PNG with palette is normally smaller than the same GIF.
For images like Ravana wants to create with her political maps I would think palettes are better than true color. For one, if you want to change the color of one country, simply change the palette entry color. Also whenever you want to do anything else with your map than just viewing you can correspond palette numbers to countries. (Yes, that is the programmer in me.)

But that is for the final result. Any intermediate states should be in GIMPs own XCF format. Because no other format can store all the information GIMP can have in an image. Like layers, alpha layers, paths and so on. You won't need these information in the final result, but will be happy to have them at all stages of editing.
Same goes for other programs and their project formats.

 

[Ravana]

@Ravana: if it's too hard to meet the forum limits, why not use external image hosting and link to that?

I've been considering it. But I think the latest result is enough to encourage me to stick with what I've got going, at least for the time being. Check out the "Kingdom of Lorthegnar" map in Machiavel "Visual Aids." Believe it or not, that is a .jpg file, too–after I spent some time twiddling with the save settings. (And of course it's only saved that way for uploading here; the original is still .xcf.) And it's barely a tenth the size of a max-fidelity .png file… though, irritatingly, it's larger than the .xcf file is. Which bears out what I was saying about the image already being as "compressed" as it can get in the first place.…

Oh, well. As long as it works.

 

[Johnny Cosmo]

That's looking pretty nice, but have you not considered experimenting with different quality PNG files, since they're geared towards this kind of thing, and might give you a better result than that?

And I wouldn't compare an exported image file with a project file like XCF anyway, it's not quite the same thing.

Edit: I just thought I'd add: your colours are a lot nicer now.

 

[Ravana]

That's looking pretty nice, but have you not considered experimenting with different quality PNG files, since they're geared towards this kind of thing, and might give you a better result than that?

Eventually, perhaps. Right now, I just want to get this done for the time being. I'll worry about experimenting later. Though considering the .jpg file size (at present quality) on my comp is 600k, and the .png (at maximum quality) is 5.6M, I'm not sure how far I'd have to drop the latter to equal the former. (Even at max quality, the .jpg was only 1.3M.)

I just thought I'd add: your colours are a lot nicer now.

Thank you. I thought so too. (You didn't get to see the intermediary step, where I'd backed off on the saturation: it also looked pretty good, but had its own disadvantages. To wit.…) I'm not going to be able to do what I'd originally planned in terms of shading the subdivisions–the differences are either too subtle, end up looking too much like one of the other colors, or make the subdivisions look like they aren't–but I think I've found a feasible way around that anyway. Assuming it doesn't screw up the uploaded image quality, at least. Might find out tonight, depending on how much time I can devote to it.