Thread Rating:
  • 0 Vote(s) - 0 Average
  • 1
  • 2
  • 3
  • 4
  • 5
Rooftops/Trees/Fence. Map building.
#1
,
I've been using Gimp for years but lately, I'm trying to learn some of the more complicated bits and make myself less of an idiot.  Tongue

So the present project is to build a fantasy map. 
Questions:
1. I'm trying to draw out a city full of houses from a top-down view and I'm looking for an easy way to slap down roof textures that look like they would 'flow' toward the edge of the house. 
- My best solution is to make custom roof-like brushes. I've figured out how to make animated brushes to give me nice 'roof stamps' and I think I can get that to work by taking advantage of the 'angle' property in the brush settings, but is there a quick easy way to bind a hotkey to adjust the angle via mouse scroller? It'd be hectic to pounce back and forth to adjust the angle for every little housetop.
- As said, the 'roof stamp' via animated brushes is my best solution so far, but is there a way to have something more along the lines of the clone tool so that I can seamlessly paint a repeating roof texture onto any sized area?

2. I used animated brushes to make a forest, and that works great as long as I start at the top of the forest and stamp my way down (As the trees from one stamp cover the roots of the previous stamp.) But if I just slap a new tree into my "forest" then I can see the trunk and roots of the tree when they should be hidden behind the top of the lower tree stamp.
Is there a way to take an animated brush and say, for example, "Always put 'this part' behind the layer, and 'this part' on top of the layer."?

3. How about fences, i.e. how do I make the brush that will rotate my 'fence stamp' to follow whatever silly line I draw the fence at?

Thanks a lot!  Cool
Reply
#2
Roof:
Use your roof brush to create a pattern.
1. Create a new image to the size you require
2. Use roof brush to make a single stamp
3. Image > Crop to Content
4. Edit > Copy or Ctrl-C
In the patterns dialogue you will now have Clipboard Pattern (the very first one - top left).
5.Select the Bucket Fill tool, set to Pattern and select the clipboard pattern.
Area is filled with roof pattern (use a selection to limit extent if required).
Note: You can Export this as a png and put it in the patterns folder of your user profile to make it permanent.

Forest:
Don't put all your trees on one layer. Have 3 (or more) layers eg Forest Back, Forest Middle, Forest Front.
Select the appropriate layer

Fence:
Create a new brush dynamic for your fence brush
1. Select the Paint Brush, then click on Dynamics
2. Click "Open the dynamics selection dialogue" (see attached image)
3. At the bottom of the dialogue, click on "Create a new dynamics"
4. At the top, give a name. eg change the default "Untitled" to "Direction"
5. In the mapping matrix check opposite the Angle row and Direction column (see image)
Use this dynamic for your fence.
Note1: It may be necessary to rotate your fence brush say 90 deg
Note2: Works best stroking a path rather than painting free hand


Attached Files Thumbnail(s)
   
Reply
#3
Quote:3. How about fences, i.e. how do I make the brush that will rotate my 'fence stamp' to follow whatever silly line I draw the fence at?

Not so easy. These 'maps' tend to be a sort of isometic projection. Horizontal and near horizontal not too dificult but vertical is a problem. As a quick try, a 4 layer gih brush might export like this. Greyscale to take FG colour.

[Image: hnYslDb.jpg]

..and paint like this...

[Image: pydfy9A.jpg]

You can see the problem with the verticals. Might be as good with a line of dots. Just experiment.
Reply
#4
,
Well, I've had a lot of progress with the fence. Thanks so much!  Cool
However, there are two issues that are driving me nuts:

1. I've meticulously edited my source brush images for several hours off and on, but I can't stop it from making occasional white outlines when I change the size of the brush.
Any idea how I can stop it, or at least make it a black outline instead?

2. I've been messing with my "shortcuts" for a long time too, but I can't seem to get it to work the way it looks like it should be working. The goal is to use my mouse scroll to rotate my brush.

(Hopefully, my screenshot goes here.)
https://imgur.com/a/dId0tgU

Also, thirdly, Is there by chance a way to change the size of a layer/image without changing the number of pixels it uses? -My world map works nice at 15k x 15k pixels, a map of one of the cities is 7k x 7k pixels, a layout of a house would work nice at 2k x 2k, and I'd love to have some sprites around the room at 64 x 64. And what I'd like to accomplish is the ability to look at the sprite, but then be able to zoom all the way out to see the whole world, without having an image that is technically a million pixels across. In other words: How do I build google maps?
Reply
#5
1) If  this is the white pixellated outlines in your screenshot below, they are part of the brush. Non-parametric brushes are bitmaps and as such don't scale well, it would be better to create the brush at the biggest size and only scale it down. You should also use the Brush instead of the Pencil. Are the brushes color or grayscale?

2) Are you using 2.8 or 2.10? Your screenshot shows 2.8 values.

If you are using 2.10, you have imported your 2.8 controllerrc file. Just erase it from the Gimp profile to have Gimp recreate one with the defaults. These default settings put the brush angle on alt-shift-wheel:

   

If you are using 2.8, as far as I remember the only usable combo is Alt-Ctrl-wheel, and you have to depress Alt+Ctrl in the right order otherwise the combo is hijacked by something else.

3) Get in touch with Google, because this isn't going to happen with Gimp Smile
Reply
#6
,
1. Yup, the white outline. These are color. It seems to be the worst at about scale size 44... Which ironically is about the perfect size for their use... Here is a picture. https://imgur.com/uCjbptx

2. You're right. Awesome. I've got things working pretty well now, thanks.
- Sub question, Shift+MouseScrollButton+MoveMouse rotates the whole project. That's awesome but super laggy with this size of a project. That particular key combo is something I frequently mishap my way into and it's super annoying. Is there a way to nuke that shortcut? I can't find it in Input Controllers or Interface > Keyboard Shortcuts.

3. Hehehe. *Inner child sobs* Yeah, that's what I thought. Thanks!
Reply
#7
(09-01-2019, 03:37 PM)Nicadeamas Wrote: 1. Yup, the white outline. These are color. It seems to be the worst at about scale size 44... Which ironically is about the perfect size for their use...

Could you attach the brush file here. The .gbr (or gih) file.
(Not sure if those file types are allowed here - if not zip the file and then attach.)
Reply
#8
(09-01-2019, 03:37 PM)Nicadeamas Wrote: 1. Yup, the white outline. These are color. It seems to be the worst at about scale size 44... Which ironically is about the perfect size for their use... Here is a picture. https://imgur.com/uCjbptx

Some of these looks badly cut tout.
Reply
#9
(08-16-2019, 01:11 PM)Nicadeamas Wrote: ,
I've been using Gimp for years but lately, I'm trying to learn some of the more complicated bits and make myself less of an idiot.  Tongue

So the present project is to build a fantasy map. 
Questions:
1. I'm trying to draw out a city full of houses from a top-down view and I'm looking for an easy way to slap down roof textures that look like they would 'flow' toward the edge of the house. 
- My best solution is to make custom roof-like brushes. I've figured out how to make animated brushes to give me nice 'roof stamps' and I think I can get that to work by taking advantage of the 'angle' property in the brush settings, but is there a quick easy way to bind a hotkey to adjust the angle via mouse scroller? It'd be hectic to pounce back and forth to adjust the angle for every little housetop.
- As said, the 'roof stamp' via animated brushes is my best solution so far, but is there a way to have something more along the lines of the clone tool so that I can seamlessly paint a repeating roof texture onto any sized area?

2. I used animated brushes to make a forest, and that works great as long as I start at the top of the forest and stamp my way down (As the trees from one stamp cover the roots of the previous stamp.) But if I just slap a new tree into my "forest" then I can see the trunk and roots of the tree when they should be hidden behind the top of the lower tree stamp.
Is there a way to take an animated brush and say, for example, "Always put 'this part' behind the layer, and 'this part' on top of the layer."?

3. How about fences, i.e. how do I make the brush that will rotate my 'fence stamp' to follow whatever silly line I draw the fence at?

Thanks a lot!  Cool

This would be much more easily accomplished in a program like Sketchup where you can repeat arrays, use roof textures (either SU's or those imported from free texture sites), bird's-eye-view trees, same with fence lines, roads, etc. In Gimp you can easily copy a texture to the clipboard then select an area you want to paste it into and paste.
Reply


Forum Jump: