Hi, this tutorial will teach you how to make authentic looking minimaps... WITHOUT PHOTOSHOP! First of all, download GIMP... it is the top two downloads here: GIMP Once you have GIMP open, familiarize yourself with some of the tools. When you are ready... load in your minimap. It should be in Application Data\My The Lord of the Rings, The Rise of the Witch-King Files\Maps\*your map name*\*your map name*.tga... Open it and it should look like this:

First, We are going to desaturate it a bit... Go to Layers|Colors|Desaturate. Next we use need to bring out the dark lines... Filters|Edges|Edge-Detect, I use Smear, 2.0 and Gradient. It should now look like this:

Now we are going to invert it, so that the outstanding lines are black. Now there are some things we have to do ourselves, for example some hills might not be as outstanding as we might want them to be, or the water may not have the necessary effects. Take a pencil, size 1 and take care of your water, I zig-zag it, you may prefer to show the waves on the other hand. Then take the brush (same size, and paint around your more prominent hills.

Now we are going to make it so only the black shows, and the grey will be very light. We go to Layers|Transparency|Color to Alpha, and set it to white. Now invert it again so that all that was black is now white, this is because we can't change the black to a different color. Now we go to Filters|Colors|Colorify and double click on the custom colors button and type this in as the hex value: 804600 Now it should be brown. Now for the last step, we need to rotate it, don't ask me why but otherwise the minimaps are upside down. Go to Layers|Transform|Rotate 180 Degrees. Now save it as *your map name*_art.tga and check it ingame.

(Now you are supposed to test this ingame, but since I am busy I will take a cheat and put the texture behind the brown stuff. I do this by using Layers|Duplicate Layer, then I erase the bottom layer and paste the texture (from Apt\Palantir.big) in there (resizing if necessary).

A small note, the map used in this tutorial is my testing map for mods which makes it easy to level up heroes, purchase ring-heroes, and get money. Have fun! Hopefully some of the esteemed mappers will be able to include these now!

 

Modding is simply putting the pieces back together...

2/4/07