PeaceHeather

Thanks, yellowman - that definitely looks promising. I think it may need one or two tweaks to get it exactly where I want it, but you've put me on the righ tpath and I'm already pretty sure what those tweaks will be. Cheers!

I'm working on a piece right now where I would like to have the main impression be that the picture was drawn in wet sand with a stick. I've made decent progress with colors and Effects > Noise > Grain, along with some Engravy/Embossy goodness, but so far I'm only able to reach an impression of sandstone. I'm trying to figure out a way to generate a few lumps of sand along the edges of the drawn lines, and possibly add a glistening wet look to the overall image. Suggestions? Many thanks, Heather

Yellowman, two things: 1. You. Are. A. GENIUS. Oh my goodness, this looks freaking *perfect*! I will try it as soon as my kid is asleep and let you know how it goes. It looks like you need to start with something roughly half the eventual length of the system, is that about right? 2. If you're Yellowman, why is your avatar red? Thank you, thank you, thank you!

Oh, oops. I'd forgotten about that. Sorry.

Oooooooooh, pretty... I can't give you a tutorial, since this is way beyond MY abilities, but I'm seeing some sort of fractal or fern generator, definitely use of gradient mapping, and beyond that... I got nothin'.

Just wanted to let you know that this is nearly the single most useful plugin I have. If there were a way to organize plugins into a "favorites" folder, it would be near the top - my maps could/would NEVER look as good without it. You freakin' rock for building this. One question, though - for some reason I'm having trouble seeing the top color of a gradient in my image after I set it up. For example, I have an "ocean" gradient with several shades of blue on up to white (for use near shorelines), and the white is often just not there in the image, unless I make a huge adjustment to the gradient - as in, I make sure the top third is dedicated to white, and then it will just barely show up. I'm applying this to rendered clouds with transparent cutouts, selecting "preserve alpha", but... *shrug* I've tried turning Wrap on and off, I've tried applying to just the selected clouds and applying to the whole layer; nothing seems to make a difference. I don't remember it doing this with the previous version I had of the plugin. Do you have any idea what *might* be happening? If not, it's no tragedy or anything, since I *can* make it work. I'm just curious about the change and what might be causing it. Cheers, and thanks again for a terrific plugin.

This thread at the Cartographer's Guild is where I'm posting the work in progress. Mountnman, I did fiddle with the lightning plugin somewhat last night, but it isn't *quite* right. It's really close, but the shapes are off no matter how I adjust the settings. And then I tried quad/reshape or whatever it's called, and got some interesting distortions with *some* taper, but again, not really what I was looking for. Sarkut, if we keep this up the holiday police will come after us. International Talk Like A Pirate Day isn't until September. Matey. Anyway, if you follow the thread over yonder, the most recent image I have was done by flattening my basic "land" layers into a .png, loading that into a terrain thingy called Wilbur, and using it to calculate where water *would* flow, hence where the valleys and rivers would form. But I still run into a problem: even though I can bring that back over into PDN, and I know how to bring it in as a layer in my current map, I can't figure out a decent way to get those rivers in place on my land without hand-tracing them all (in which case they still look, well, painted on) - and I'd prefer to be able to do the whole thing in PDN anyway, rather than rely on some other program to draw them in for me. It's kind of a thing with me, being over on a forum dominated by GIMP-users - no matter how friendly and helpful they've all been. I don't mind having Wilbur do the calculations if I have to, but I'd rather be able to make PDN do the drawing rather than borrowing Wilbur's picture, if that makes sense. Anyway, I really appreciate you both taking a look at this for me. I'll try just about any suggestion you offer, and let you know how it goes. Cheers! Heather

I want believable rivers on a map I am making in PDN. I don't know of a way to get good, squiggly, tapering rivers in the right places that don't look like they were plunked down by a chimpanzee. Your suggestions or, heaven forfend, a tutorial, would be deeply appreciated. Virtual cookies, or beer, or whatever. I make a mean virtual Brandy Alexander...

Gorgeous. And I know what you mean about tutorials, I'm over on Cartographer's Guild and most of their stuff is for Photoshop, GIMP, and who knows what all else, but not PDN. So I occasionally publish translations.

Thanks, I'll give that a shot. Being able to adjust the angle will be the biggest help. You know, I browsed the plug-in index earlier this week and downloaded a ton of stuff, but I don't remember seeing that for some reason. Oh, well. I already have a pile of them that I don't use and should uninstall - my menus are getting really cluttered! Thanks again.

May I ask - why orange to start? Absolutely freakin stunning effect, btw. Heather

I can do that - I just didn't want to irritate people by constantly saying, "see this thing at the Cartographer's Guild that I want to do?" ...even though, come to think of it, that's pretty much what I'm after. I have a feeling that most of these will be solved with a "download this plugin (*mutteridiotmutter*)"... Currently I'm trying to decipher Simple Mountains in GIMP - specifically steps 6 and 11. I'd also like to figure out how they did the forests that are already present in the starting image, but I can wait on asking that one. Cheers!

Har har... I meant, did anyone else have questions about PDN equivalents/workarounds for features in GIMP or Photoshop, or whatever? I've got two more: light sources, and shaped gradients. I *think* I know how to do a linear gradient inside a shape, and have it reflect outward from the center, but I don't know if I can get a gradient that follows a crooked line a la mountain peaks or canyons. Or rather, I don't know if I can do that and be able to dictate the shape of the crooked line. And I'm not totally sure about getting a light source to shine where I want it, either. Cheers! Heather

Ahh so, isn't this nifty... Many thanks! Now, is anyone else curious about Paint.NET equivalents? I'm good for now.

Instead of curves, I used Effects > Color > Color Aberration, cropped the result to remove streaks around the edges, then added a third layer with an offset Drop Ripple. This is what I ended up with: Heather