How to Create a 3D Terrain Map Cube in GIMP 2.10

[Music] [Music] hello and welcome to yet another tutorial by Davies media design my name is Michael Davies and in today's tutorial I'll be showing you how to create an isometric 3d map using this is conversion to point 10.8 which is the latest version of at the time of this tutorial but of course before we get into that I want to direct you guys over to my website at Davies media design.com as always we have tons of video and text tutorials on here so definitely check that out you can also enroll in my 2.10 masterclass from beginner to pro photo editing on udemy and you can support our channel and help us grow by becoming a patron on patreon and I'll include a link to this as well as all the relevant links from this tutorial in the description of the video I'll be using a couple of free images here from pixabay so I have this image of an aerial view of some mountains in a landscape and I also have this photo here of some dirt which we're going to use for these sides of our 3d cube we're gonna be creating so I'll just minimize the browser window and here is our final composition so I'll hold ctrl and zoom in with my mouse wheel you can see we have some elements here that look nice and 3d and the mountains are giving it some really nice dimension as well and then we've got the dirt here which is nice and shaded and it makes the cube look 3d as well as the shadow right here and we also have a cool reflection so this technique or this composition will really work with any aerial photo so one you grabbed on a stock image website one you took yourself or maybe one you grabbed from Google Earth but let's dive in here so I'm gonna start by coming over to file and in my case I'll go to open recent and I'm gonna choose isometric grid 1920 1080 I'll leave this file for you guys to download in the description of the video as well as a tutorial on how to create an isometric grid so if I hold ctrl and zoom in you'll see that our isometric grid is made up of equilateral triangles and if I come over here and hide one of these layers you'll see that now this looks more like a perspective grid so this just creates an easy way for us to draw items and make them 3d all within perspective which adds to that 3d element but first I'll start by drawing the first portion of our cube shape and so I'll come over here and collapse the ISO grid layer and I'm going to click on my background layer and then come down here and create a new layer and so this one I'm going to named cube outline and I'll click OK and then I'll come over here and create a a new layer and I'm gonna name this one cube fill and make sure your mode is set to normal and transparency is your fill with so click OK I'm just going to drag the ISO grid below these two layers and now I'm going to make sure I have my path tool selected here and I'll hold ctrl and zoom out what you need to do is determine how large you want your cube to be so we're going to draw the first surface of our cube with this path tool and so I'm just going to click on our isometric grid and create a point and now I'm just going to come over here and click to create another point so these are just random points that I'm creating but I do want to follow the line here because these points need to be on the same line and you can always drag this node around after the fact if you need to and I'm very loosely drawing these points right now so I'm just going to put this point right here and loosely place it and then I'll come over here hold ctrl to create a union between the last and the first points and I do have an entire tutorial dedicated to how to master the path tool so I recommend checking that out if you haven't already as you can see these two points are not on the same line so I'll just click and drag this so that they are and now we have a rough outline of our cube I'm gonna hold the Alt key to enter move mode and just move this over and move it up a little bit and now I'll hold ctrl and zoom in because we need to just really make sure that everything is nice and aligned so I'm gonna align it to the center guide here and it should snap to that guide if not go to view snap to guides and if you don't have a guide at all you can go to image guides new guide by percent and you can choose horizontal first click OK then do this again with vertical and that'll create some center guides if you downloaded my file or if you follow along with my ISO grid tutorial you should have the center guides on here and I'm gonna hold ctrl and zoom in right here so we don't have guides in this area so I'm just going to eyeball this make sure it's nice and aligned there hold ctrl and zoom out and hold ctrl and zoom in here same thing just going to make sure this is nice and aligned it should snap to that Center guide and come over here hold ctrl zoom in and make sure this is nice and aligned now we have the first section of our cube so we need to go ahead and Stroke this path and then fill it so I'll come over here and first start with the cube outline layer then come over here and choose stroke path make sure your color is set to black here if not you can click this icon and reset your foreground and background colors I'll choose solid color set the line width to 1 make sure the anti-aliasing is checked come over here to line style and make sure this is a straight line and then click stroke and now I'll come over here to the cube fill layer and this time I'll choose fill path solid color should still be black you could choose any color you want if you don't like black and I'll just click fill and you guys will see why we need a fill in an outline layer as we get into this tutorial a little bit further but now we need to go ahead and duplicate this because we have the top layer of the cube and we need the bottom layer so I'll come over here to our paths tab and here's the path we just created you can unhide that and I'm just going to duplicate this so we have two of them now and with my path tool still selected I'm going to hold the Alt key to enter move mode again and I'll click and drag this and I'm just using that Center guide there to keep this centered as I move it down how far you move this down depends on how thick you want the cube to look so I'm gonna go with right there and I'll hold ctrl and zoom in and I'm gonna use the Alt key just to move this into place make sure that that is nice and centered on that Center guide there and then I'm just going to look around the grid and make sure everything is nice and lined up you can also zoom in here come over to your cube fill layer and hide that and make sure that is nice and lined up which it is so I'll zoom out so now we have our two paths here you can see we have the top path and the bottom path I'll come over back to the paths tab and I'm just going to show and hide this to make sure I know which path this is so this is the bottom one so I'll put cube bottom and then here I'll put cube top this is just keeping everything nice and organized I'll come back over to the layers panel unhide this cube fill layer for now and then I'll come over here and create a new layer I'm going to name this cube fill bottom okay and then create one more new layer and name this cube outline bottom click okay so I'm gonna grab my pass tool again come over here to the past tab make sure I'm clicked on the cube bottom path and I'll start with the outline so come over here and click stroke path again all the settings should be the same and I'll click stroke and then click fill path solid color fill so now we have the top and bottom layers of our cube I'm just going to do a little bit of organizing now by putting all these elements into one single layer group so I'll come over here and create a layer group and I'm going to come over here and name this cube shapes and hit enter and now I'll click and drag each of these layers into the layer group I'm just making sure that these are in order as I place these in the layer group you can tell when you're in the layer group because the line right here the little black line that shows up will be shorter you can see right here the line is a little bit longer because it's not in a layer group versus right here it's shorter so now everything is inside one layer group and these shapes are going to guide us as we start adding elements into this composition so now we're going to open up our landscape image so I'm going to open up my file folder I'm going to come over to downloads and just search for that image and so here it is so I'll click and drag this into the composition and release and then I'll drag this in as a layer right now it's inside our layer group which I don't want so I'm going to click and drag this outside the layer group and let me just rename this landscape to make things easier and I'm going to grab my move tool and just move this into place so as you guys can see the photo is actually a little bit smaller than our cube right now and that is not ideal but we can fix this by grabbing the scale tool so I'll come over here and click on my scale tool and make sure my interpolation is set to no halo or low halo so now I'll come over here and click on my image layer with the scale tool I'm just going to click and drag while holding the shift key and that's going to ensure that this scales with the same aspect ratio so go with about right there and I'll come over here and do the same thing so we want it to be a little bit larger than the cube but not too much larger so we're just dragging this until we know for sure that the sides of our image are overlapping the ends of our cube and the less I scale this up the more quality will be maintained in the original image so now I'll come over here and click scale and that'll scale that up now come over here and grab my move tool and I'm going to move this into place and you'll see there's a little center plus sign right here and that is going to snap to the grid and then we're going to just move this up a little bit so go with about right there now that we've imported our photo we've scaled it and we've moved it into place next we need to mask out the excess areas that are going outside of the boundaries of our cube so I'm going to come over here to my layers panel and first off this is my cube top layer and I'm just going to come over here and add top here so that we're not confused as we're working on these layers so now we have our bottom layers here and our top layers here but I'll come over here to the cube fill top layer and I'm going to alt click on this layer which is going to create a selection and now I'll come over here to the landscape layer right click and go to add layer mask and make sure initialize layer mask 2 is set to selection and then click Add and that will mask out all areas of our image that go outside of that cube area so that's why we created that cube fill top and cube fill bottom layer is so we can mask everything out so I'll hit ctrl shift a to deselect that area and I'm also going to come over here to our paths tab and I'm actually going to hide our paths because we don't need those right now and it's just sort of a distraction and then I'll come back to our layers panel so we've masked everything outside of the cube but the issue with that is that this doesn't look 3-dimensional at all so we need to mask back in some of the three-dimensional areas of our image so I'm going to come over and hold ctrl and zoom in a bit and then I'll grab my brush tool and I'm going to switch the color over to white and I'm gonna make sure I have a brush with the hardness of a hundred so you can click on your brushes here and grab a hard brush and you can see the hardness right here is turn all the way up to 100 and I'm going to increase the size my brush using the brackets on my keyboard and I'm just going to paint some of these mountain areas back in and this is going to take a couple of goes but I'm just going to paint some of the area right here and I actually want this going all the way to the edge of my cube so I'm just going to paint all the way there and I also want this area right here to be 3d so I'll paint some of that in and we'll keep it there for now I'll hit the x key on my keyboard to switch over to black hold ctrl and zoom in and then I'm going to decrease the size of my brush because I don't want any of the sky to be revealed here so I'm just gonna erase the sky it's okay if you erase a little bit of the mountain because the hardness of the brush is basically going to create a nice smooth edge I'll hold the spacebar to move over and let me decrease the brush size again hold ctrl and use my mouse wheel to zoom in make sure we delete all of the sky portions hold ctrl and zoom in and I'll use the spacebar to move over and a whole can roll and zoom in right here so for this portion you can kind of create your own shapes based on whatever you want because portions of the mountain do sort of overlap right here and then go off the edge of the photo here so we can only keep so much which means you sort of have to just invent your own shape of the mountain here so you can either erase part of this mountain or you can actually just keep this little bump right there and then come over here same thing you can just sort of determine where you want to erase on this photo what you want to keep what you want to erase but that looks cool that looks nice and 3d right there I'm gonna hold ctrl and zoom in and I'm gonna increase the size my brush and switch back over to white you can just hit the X on your keyboard or hit that arrow right there and right here I also want to determine what I want to keep from this mountain so we've got a second peak here but this one again goes way off of the edge of the image so what I'll do is I'll just sort of bring this all in here like so and you may need to come over here and decrease the opacity of this just for this portion so you can see where the end of your cube is so here's the end of our cube decrease the size of my brush here using the brackets on my keyboard and make sure you are clicked on your layer masks still control Z I'm actually going to hit X to switch back to black and paint this part out so I want the end of this photo to meet with the end of the cube that's just going to create a better illusion there all right so we have that corner nice and set up so now we just need to fix this area and determine how we want the mountains to sort of roll into the end of the cube so right now I have black as my color I'm going to increase the size of my brush here and we've got some sky right here that we need to get rid of and then we can also just sort of create a hard line right here we don't want it to be too harsh so we might want to round out the peak right here a little bit this part is all up to you guys in sort of your artistic vision all right so that looks pretty good we can always go back and fix that a little bit later and now I want to work on this portion so again I want there to be a nice transition to the corner it doesn't have to perfectly meet up with the corner here let me hit X to switch over to white and decrease the size of my brush so I just want there to be a nice transition to the corner I'll hit the X key and I'm just going to try to make this nice and smooth here and a hold control I actually want to erase a good portion of this decrease the size my brush I'm gonna hold ctrl and zoom out and let me just fix this area right here all right again we can always come back later and adjust these if we want but now we have a nice 3d look right here and so the top of our cube is pretty much set for now we're gonna go back and make some more adjustments to this to make it look a little bit more realistic and it makes some of the highlights and shadows kind of pop a little bit but for now we're just gonna leave this right here up until this point we've done a lot of work on the top of the cube we've done some work on the bottom but we haven't done anything with the sides yet so now I'm going to draw the size of our cube and I'm going to start by coming over here and hiding the cube outline bottom layer and I noticed something when I did that which is that I put the fill and the outline on the same layer so actually what I'm gonna have to do is fix this so I'm gonna come over here to the cube fill bottom layer come over to the paths tab again unhide the cube bottom path grab my path tool click on that path come back to the layers panel and I will go ahead and Stroke the path I'll just hit stroke these two should be on different layers if they're not just go back and do what I just did and the names of these are now wrong so let me just change the name of these real quick so this one is actually the fill and then this one is the outline so come back and hide that path and now that we fixed that I'll just hide the cube fill bottom layer all I want is the outline right here we don't want the fill and the next step is I have to create a new layer for the size of the cube so I'm going to click and create a new layer and I'll name this cube outline side and this is going to be the left side so let me just add that note there and I'll fill this with transparency and click OK so here's that new layer I'm going to move it to the top of the layer group and I'm going to do the same thing but this time for the fill so cube fill left side so now we have both new layers I'm gonna click on the outline left side layer to start and now I'll come over and make sure I have my path tool selected and I'm going to hold ctrl and zoom in with my mouse wheel so what I'm gonna do is create some nodes just like I did for the top and bottom of our cube so I'm going to use the guide right here as a prints and I'm just loosely placing these nodes right now some of the place went up here and we're gonna make sure that this is with the outline here so here's the outline of the bottom portion of our cube again if you can't see it you can temporarily hide the ISO grid but now I need to create a union here between the last node that I created and the first one so I'll hold ctrl and click to create that Union and now I need to go ahead and move these nodes into place so that they are aligned better with the grid make sure you clicked on the node and off these segments the line segment hold ctrl zoom out and I'm just going to put this into place it's a little hard to tell with that photo right there so I'll just hide that real quick and I'm also going to come over here and unhide this portion of the grid because I do need the straight line as a reference then I'm going to move over hold ctrl zoom in and just align this part and make sure this is nice and aligned all right so that's looking good so now we need to stroke the outline here so make sure you're on your cube outline left side layer come over to stroke path and keep all the settings the same and hit stroke just make sure that black is your foreground color and then I'll move over to the cube fill left side layer and come over to fill path and then click fill and now we have a fill there so we've got the left side of our cube set up now we need to set up the right side so we'll do the same thing I'll create a new layer I'm just going to name these cube fill right side and then I'm going to do cube outline right side and now I'll just move over make sure I have my path tool selected again and you might have to click off that tool real quick just to clear that other path you drew and we're going to start off on the outline right layer so hold ctrl and zoom in a bit and I'm going to hide the fill top and the fill left side layers just so we could see the ISO grid a little bit better so click to create a node right there and I'll loosely put one right there and I'll click the create one here and then I'll hold control create a union right there we do need to make sure there's some overlap here so I'm going to unhide all those fill layers real quick and turn down the opacity and by turning down the opacity you can see we can still see the iso grid but we can also see the various sides of our cube a hold ctrl and zoom in so we just need to align this up here so go with right there that actually looks pretty good make sure this is nice and aligned and zoom in here make sure this is aligned and also overlapping all right everything looks good so I'm going to come back up here to the cube outline right layer and then come over here and click stroke path and I'll click stroke and then come over here to the fill layer click fill path choose solid color click fill and now we have both sides of our cube here so let's come back here and turn the opacity of these layers up a little bit and we can come back up here to the landscape layer and unhide that all right now we're going to bring in the photo of the dirt to place on the sides of the cube so I'll come over here to my file folder again and I'm just going to type in ground in the search box because I know our image contains the word ground I'm going to click and drag this in the and release it and that'll place this inside of and if you have to move this out of the layer group just click and drag it to the very top and now with my move tool selected I'm going to click and drag this into place and I actually need two of these layers one for the left side and one for the right so I'll come over here click on this layer and duplicate it and I'll move one of these layers over here and let me just show and hide this so I can see which one this is and now I'm going to change this one to say dirt right because this will be the right side and I'll change this one to say dirt left and I can just hide the dirt right layer for now next what I need to do is grab my perspective tool because we're going to change the perspective of the image to match the perspective of the left side of the cube and I'm going to click on that image and I'm going to use the isometric grid here to drag this into place and we're going to refine this in a second here so hold ctrl and zoom in and right now we need to make sure that everything is on the same line I'll just drag that in a little bit there drag this one in hold ctrl and zoom in this part doesn't have to be completely perfect but it will look a little bit better if you take some extra time to align this to the iso grid i'ma hold the spacebar move over we can see that these two items are on the same line because this line right here can go through these points right here so I'm just going to click and drag this portion down a bit until this part of lines and I'm also making sure that this is still on this line right here so we're making sure we're aligned on both of these parts you don't want the image going too far off of the side of the cube because we do want as much detail as we can keep inside of this image right here the larger you make the image the larger the grains of dirt will look and the less realistic this is going to look so it looks pretty good to me so I'll hit transform and now we have the dirt on the left side here and I'll come over here and do the same thing on the right and the reason I'm going to do these relatively at the same time as I want them to be somewhat the same height and the same size in general that's just going to make sure that the grains of dirt are the same on both sides of the cube in terms of their size so I'll unhide the dirt right layer use my move tool to drag this one into place now and we may have to decrease the opacity of the left side here so I move this into place grab my perspective tool click on this layer now and we'll do the same thing so again we want these to be relatively the same size they don't have to be exactly the same size but the closer the better for sure you all right once you have that in place hit transform and now we have the perspective for both sides of the dirt here now we need to clean these up obviously and we'll do so using the layer masks so I'll come over here to our dirt left layer for starters and turn the opacity up and then I'll find the cube fill left side layer right here hold the Alt key and click and that will give us a selection area and then I'll come over to the dirt left layer right click go to add layer mask and choose selection and click Add and we'll do the same for the right side here so we're gonna hit ctrl shift a to deselect that area click on the dirt right layer alt click on the cube fill right side right click go to add layer mask and choose selection again and click Add I'll hit ctrl shift a to deselect that and so now we have both sides of our cube the issue here is that the shading looks the same in both photos because the lighting is the same in both photos so we'll have to adjust one of the sides of our cube so that it's a little darker than the other side in this case I'm going to go with the right side so I'll make sure that I'm clicked off the layer mask on the actual photo right here and I'll come over here to colors levels and now I can play around with the levels here and just make that side a little bit darker I have an entire tutorial dedicated to the levels tool if you guys want to check that out and so I'm just adjusting the arrows here and by bringing this arrow in we are clamping the output of the whites which is going to make that site a little bit darker overall so there's a before there's an after and once you have everything to your liking you can click OK and so now this side of the cube is a little bit darker than this side we'll go back a little bit later and further refine the lighting on the sides of our cube to make this look a little bit more realistic but real quick what I want to do here is I want to enhance the 3d look of this cube so what I'll do is I'll grab my paint brush tool and I'm going to switch over to white this time I'll make sure I'm clicked on my layer mask and I'll increase the size of my brush using the brackets on my keyboard hold ctrl and zoom in a bit and what I'll do is I'll just mask in some of this parts of the sides of our cube and let me just decrease the size of the brush real quick and I'm only doing this on the parts that look a little bit raised and the reason is that it looks like the chunk that we took out follows the topography of the actual landscape photo there so it just looks like it's raised and we don't want to mask anything on the corner here because that will ruin our corner our straight corner so I'll go right to the edge but I won't paint past the edge there and I'll do the same over here increase the size of my brush and click on my dirt left layer mask there so any parts that are raised you could just paint a little bit here you can always increase or decrease the size of your brush if it doesn't line up you don't want this to be too smooth because it doesn't look entirely realistic so you want to make it look a little bit jagged there so you could do that by increasing and decreasing the size of your brush so hold ctrl and in a bit so anywhere where you see any sort of raised area you can just perform this technique all right we've added to the illusion that there is raised elevation going on on the size of our cube now we're going to work on making it look like the river is going through parts of the soil that we can see in the chunk that we took out of the cube so I'll come over here and create a new layer and we'll just name this River fill with transparency click OK and I'm gonna make sure my paintbrush tool is selected here and I'll click on my landscape layer and hold ctrl and zoom in and what I'll do is I'll hold the ctrl key and I'm going to click and grab a color from our River because we want to use the river color here and I'm just going to move around my image a bit and I'll come over to our River layer again make sure this is actually above the dirt layers and I decrease the size of my brush a bit and now I'm going to paint straight down so that it matches the perspective here of our dirt so now it looks like we have a little bit of a chunk of water right here and I'm gonna hold ctrl zoom in I'm gonna do the same any parts where I see any bit of water so that looks pretty good there and we can do this for both sides of the cube here so if there's any here which this part of the river doesn't go to the end so we don't need to do it there but that just has a tiny bit of detail to our 3d cube once I've done that I'm going to organize our composition a bit by putting all of these elements into a single layer group so come over here create a new layer group and I'll come up here and I'm just going to name this cube elements and hit the answer key and just click and drag all of these elements in the same order into the layer group and this will come in handy a little bit later now it's time to use our Dodge and burn tool to adjust some of the lighting add a little bit of shading out a little bit of highlights to the various elements of our cube so I'll hold ctrl and zoom out a bit and I'll come over here to the Dodge and burn tool and I'm going to increase the size of my brush here for now and I'll start with the actual landscape so I'll come over to the landscape layer make sure I'm clicked on that and not the layer mask I'm just going to adjust the size of this and I'll test this out so I'll hit control Z I'm going to decrease the hardness of my brush quite significantly here and also decrease the opacity and we'll test that out it looks a little bit better I'm going to decrease the opacity a little bit more and actually decrease the hardness even more so you'll just have to adjust your settings until you get them the way you want all right so that's starting to look pretty close here and that looks pretty good so we're just going to add some highlights here throughout the image just real small highlights you can always increase or decrease the size your brush so hold ctrl and zoom in I actually want to add some highlights to the river I'll just draw this on the river and maybe some parts right here so any parts really where you see light hitting the landscape here you're going to want to just sort of enhance that a little bit maybe even parts of the mountain here again this is all part of your artistic vision but now we're going to switch over to the burn tool and we're just going to do the same thing except with the shadowy areas and that's just going to add a little bit of contrast and I actually want to I'm going to increase this I'm going to add some contrast where the photo kind of falls off here and I can increase that contrast again and then anywhere where you see shadows you can just paint with the burn tool let me undo that don't want to overdo it all right so that's hope to add some contrasts in here now we're going to do the same for the dirt layers so come over here and start with the dirt left layer this is the lighter side of the dirt so we don't want to add too many shadows here but we do want to add a little bit so that it just gives it a little bit more dimension so you can see I'm just sort of painting the shadows along the edge here trying to lightly do so and I'll come back up top here increase the opacity and just add a little bit of darkness right there a little bit of shadows on the edge now hold ctrl and zoom in I actually want to decrease my brush size and add some shadows around the parts of the river here it's not doing too much right now you can always increase the opacity that way just looks like the soil is almost like a little bit more damp right here just adds to the realism and now I'll come over here to the right side and do the same thing so I'll just decrease the opacity a bit increase the size of my brush and just add a little bit of shading there all right now real quick we'll come back up to the landscape layer and I'll come over to colors levels and I'm just going to adjust the levels of this photo just to help it look a little bit more dramatic and a little bit more realistic right now it's a bit on the bright side and there's not as much contrast as I would like so I'm just going to increase that contrast so you can see there there's a little more contrast now so I'll click OK and now I'm going to click on the layer mask and just zoom in right here and I'm going to grab my paintbrush switch over to black and just make sure that we paint out this portion right here I don't think this should be here and you may need to turn the hardness of your brush back up you we're now going to get into creating some shadows and reflections to further enhance the realism of our composition and so I'm going to come over here and start by clicking on my ISO grid and I'm just going to decrease the opacity a bit but I want this to be as intense for this portion and I'm going to come over to the cube fill bottom layer this is going to be the layer we're gonna use to create our drop shadow and I'll come over to filters light and shadow and I'm actually going to use long shadow for this portion so now you see we have this long shadow here I'm gonna change the style here to fading fixed-length that's going to make it have this nice fade-out look here and what I need to do is I need to change the angle of this and the length so first I'll start with the angle and I want this to go this way because we have the dark side of the cube right here which means the light is coming probably from somewhere in this direction if you get the direction right it'll look a little bit more realistic and I'm actually gonna change this back real quick to finite so I can line this up with the grid right here so I'm just going to adjust the angle and actually want to increase the length of tiny bit so let me increase the length I do want to make sure that this portion of the shadow does not go past this portion of the cube that just keeps it looking a little bit more realistic alright so once I have the right length I can align it to the ISO grid here so there we go that looks pretty good and now I'll come over and change this back to fading fixed-length and we can play around with the midpoint that's just determining where the fade is going to start here so you can see that if we drag the midpoint up a little bit there's going to be a little bit more black right here and I actually like the way that looks and you can also change the color of your shadow if you want to but I'm just going to keep it at black so now we have our shadow I'll click OK I don't like how there's this harsh line right here so I'll grab my smudge tool and I'm going to increase the size of my brush and maybe decrease the hardness a little bit zoom in and I'm just going to smudge that line right there I don't want to smudge it too much let me turn the force down a bit you might need to just click one at a time and then click to sort of blend that so there we go now I want to create the reflection that's going to go below the cube so to do that I'm going to come over here and duplicate the entire cube elements layer group but I don't need all of the elements inside this layer group I only need the dirt portions so I'll start by deleting the river layer and then I'll also delete the landscape layer and I'm going to click on the cube elements copy layer group and right-click and go to merge layer group and I'm just going to name this dirt and hit enter and actually let me name this dirt reflection and I'm gonna hit em to grab my move tool I'm gonna click and drag this holding the ctrl key to stay in straight-line mode I'll put it right about here and there are parts that overlap but don't worry about that we're going to click and drag this below the layer that has the drop shadow here so it's below the cube shapes layer group once I've done that I'm going to decrease the opacity of this layer a little bit and now I'm going to grab my eraser tool increase the size of my brush so I can use the slider or I can use the left and right brackets on my keyboard and make sure I have a nice soft brush I'll decrease the hardness here and now I'm going to click on one of these lines on my isometric grid hold the shift key and follow the line on that grid and then click and you'll see that will create a nice fade I do have to move up a line a couple lines here and that was a little bit too much so let me just move up a little bit less so we're creating a nice fade there and we're gonna do the same thing for this side so we'll click on one of these lines hold the shift key to stay in straight-line mode and then click and then you may have to manually paint this part out so now we have a cool reflection there now I'll add a drop shadow to the bottom of my cube and I'll do that by coming over here and duplicating our cube elements layer right click and go to merge layer group and I'm just going to name this cube drop shadow hit enter and I don't come over to filters light and shadow drop shadow and you'll have to play around with the settings here to get the shadow in the right spot I'm going to turn down the blur radius it's a bit too high right now so you can see right now it's offset from the corner of this part of the cube and we don't want that so we're going to drag this and actually I'm just going to set this to zero play around with the blur radius and the opacity here so I'll turn the opacity up so if I hold ctrl and zoom out you can see the drop shadow actually goes around the entire shape so I'm just going to click OK for now and I'll alt click on the cube elements layer below and that's going to create a nice selection area I'll hit ctrl I to invert that selection area and I'm making sure I'm still on my cube drop shadow layer I'll grab my eraser tool and I'm just going to erase all the parts up here on the top because we only want the drop shadow around the bottom of the cube so I'll zoom in a bit here decrease the size of my brush and I can also use the size slider to speed things up I'm just going to erase all these excess portions of the drop shadow you can keep that little part right there that adds to the realism I'm gonna erase all these portions over here hold ctrl and zoom out control shift a so now we'll come over here to view show guides and then come down here and hide the ISO grid and there is our final 3d isometric map so that's it for this tutorial hopefully you liked it if you did please subscribe to my youtube channel at youtube.com slash Davies media design you can visit our website at Davies media design com you can roll my best selling photo editing course from beginner to pro photo retoucher on udemy and you could support our channel and help us grow by becoming a patron on patreon and I'll include a link to that as well as all the relevant links from this tutorial in the description of the video so thanks for watching and we'll see you next time

Channel: Davies Media Design

Views: 17,250

Keywords: gimp, gimp tutorial, gimp for beginners, how to gimp, gimp graphic design, gimp photo editing, gimp 2019, GIMP 2.10, GIMP, basics, isometric design, isometric map, 3D design, 3-Dimensional, google earth, 3D Map, 3D isometric map, isometric grid, photo manipulation, GIMP 2.10.8, photoshop, photoshop cc

Id: WdSIflnj3OM

Length: 39min 32sec (2372 seconds)

Published: Mon Apr 01 2019