Map of Tavonni

[su_liam]

I've been messing around with the map of Tavonni by David "Hyphen" Jaques-Watson over at Citizens of the Imperium. Thanks be to Ravells for introducing me to this forum.

This map applies some of the embossing and contouring ideas I've been playing around with lately. I think with a lot of work and significantly more subtlety I could get something that could hold a dim candle to the pros here.

[ravells]

Great work! It's good to get some more Science Fiction at the Guild!

[su_liam]

A little farther along some rivers and climate, designed in icomap. Hopefully an improvement. I don't think I'll do much more on this one till I get a memory upgrade. The full image is close to 4000x2000 and photoshop cccc-rrr-aaa-www-lll-sss along.

[pyrandon]

Holy cow! That is a huge image!!!! What, are creating a life-sized model?

[su_liam]

I made some calculations, and even at that scale(8 million pixels to the planet surface), a 1-pixel river would be around 5 miles wide. That's by area.

Planets are big places. I was just trying to take that into account. It may not be worth the trouble, though. I've given myself a lot of space here and it really hasn't increased the complexity commensurately, yet. It may be better to build a less resource-intensive map and drill down with greater detail as needed. That said, Bryce can use a 4096x4096 hm for a single terrain, pretty detailed.

[Redrobes]

Yes, the MeDem map is going to be 162000 square if we can manage it. That terrain is 4000km square so that gives us 25m per pixel. Its scary how big you have to go to get good res. We would like to populate the terrain with human sized features so that you cant have a huge gap between stuff at 6ft res to that of hundreds of feet and beyond.

Even smaller stuff like those caves of the December challenge needed a few thousand pixels and my 4K submission was on the edge of giving respectably definition. In some respects thats a good argument for vector maps. But theres just as many down sides to that too.

Rivers are a particular pain given that they are so thin. The Amazon is only 6 miles at its widest point so thats your one pixel right there. At planetary sizes and at these modest resolutions, rivers are just too small to worry about.

HandsomeRobs maps have thin line rivers for sections which are 1000 pixels or so each. This is more like the scale of rivers if your trying to maintain scale.

Though this is not small, 4000 pixels is really not all that large. I would have thought Photoshop could easily cope with that. Consider that you have 8 million pixels. For RGB(A) thats just 25Mb (32Mb). There are still quite a few of those to the gig.

[su_liam]

I think ps is choking on all the layer effects. I have at least a dozen layers most of which have at least emboss effects attached. I also have a nearly full startup drive and an anemic 768mb of RAM. Photoshop can cope with all this fairly readily, I suspect. My computer on the other hand...

I'm looking at a one gig ddr board for 84.99 and some birthday money I have in my pocket. I'm also doing a little late-winter cleaning on my hd and I've moved the ps scratch disk to an empty external drive I inherited. Hopefully things will get a little peppier.

[GlennZilla]

I would suggest that you set the scratch disk to be separate than the operating system's disk. You'll find that both discs spin frequently but you'll work much faster.

The biggest improvement would be the extra RAM. You'll wonder how you lived without it.