Aug/Sept 2012 Lite Challenge Entry: Lost City of Ubar

[gen]

It really improved. I can almost feel the hole. Would put more hightlights on the face of the groud to increase contrast (will help the 3D effect). To increase depht, personnally I would work with differents dark-browns of various tones. I did some murals live-scale and we never seldom use black but work with colored black; we often forget to work the darks parts as much as lighter parts, and they are as much important.

[anomiecoalition]

Thanks for the tips...I'm definitively going to continue tweaking these images and will likely incorporate those ideas. For the time being, I wanted to get a grip on the final presentation. So, downloaded some cool arabian themed photoshop borders and played with some effects.

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[Tigon]

Very nice but the pit doesn't really follow in the style of the settlement: the shadows are from just west of north, which give a nice feel but in the after-map there is no shadowing with regards to the pit. The sun should be illuminating part of the interior, of the south-east wall in this case. So, you'd either have a funnelled slope with sand-slip, with more highlight above the actual lip, or a more sharply defined edge.

[anomiecoalition]

thanks for the suggestion on the pit and shadows...I definitely need to put some more time into it. Now that i've made a little progress on the border, i'll get back to that.

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[gen]

Oh, now i understand the hole...I didn't catch it was for the whole city. In that case, I totally agree with Tigon here. We should see the interior and maybe hightlights on part of the destroy city under? I would have that the after image of the hole the same size of the city, or near. I dont think the city can vanish in the size of this hole.
Anyhow, love the touch of finishing (frame, symbols). Looks good.

[anomiecoalition]

yeah, i have to play around with some different ideas. In the original story, the water cavity beneath the city was as large as the city itself and when it emptied, the whole thing came crashing down. So in effect we would see a large crater...but...over time, this crater would partially fill up. In this scenario, the debate is between depicting the city just after it collapsed or generations later.



I'm also debating whether or not to modify the story a bit so that the cavity only covered the market area - in this scenario, the market collapses into the sinkhole and the seismic activity that would have been triggered by this event caused the other mud-brick structures in the city to fall (i.e. walls, keep, etc.) *Of course, I'm a political scientist, not a geologist, so I have no idea if that would really happen or not. I thought that this approach might look better and require more effort than simply creating a massive hole to cover the whole city.

i'll probably try several variations...but if anyone has any preferences, i'd love to hear your opinion.

[gen]

Why choose between "the city just after it collapsed or generations later"? I would put the two of them, so the final product would be a tryptic, Before the collaps, After and Today...with a legend of possible years and other informations, it would look very interesting and documented style. After all, it is real history so there is the matter of "what was, what happened" and "look what it is today".

[Cunning Cartographer]

Totally agree that some development over time would be interesting or as you say change the story a little, otherwise the comparison between the two maps is a little stale in my opinion. It's nice to be able to see elements from both maps; what's still there and what has disappeared, what was destroyed and what survived and how it was changed. A simple "and then it was all gone" makes it hard to make the comparison. Overall it's looking good, I like the style of the market for sure, though I'm not as keen on the embossing you have done for the text, are you trying to make it look like it was letter pressed/stamped into the paper, or did you want it to look like it was written on?

[anomiecoalition]

Thanks for all the helpful comments...Don't think I have the energy to do 3 pics, but I think i'm making progress in incorporating the suggestions on the after pic. Overall I think it looks much better this way, but I still have some tweaking to do (particularly in trying to get the pit shadow right.)

I did emboss the text for the complete picture in an effort to get that imprint look...but I'm not wedded to it yet...I think I have too much text and the lettering I want to use is a little too formal to try to o a handwritten look...but i'm going to keep messing with it.

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[anomiecoalition]

just wanted to see the update side to side with the other one.

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