Fjord WIP

[Ascension]

Here's the 2 pics I started with. The first is from a book called "Cultural Atlas of the Viking World" (bought it at Borders about 5 years ago) and shows the large fjord called Sogne fjord. I had always assumed that fjords looked like the one in the previous post until I saw this one. So I went to Flash Earth and sure enough there is plenty of green, which I assume to be either trees or land. The main problem is making the land look like it slopes upwards instead of looking so flat. I tried the normal shading stuff but it comes out dark and since most people think my maps are too dark (I think they're too light) well that just leaves me stuck. Also is a screen grab of the finished river banks, re-tinting the river, adjustments to trees to eliminate the fading, added some shrubbery, and my preliminary contouring.

[Ascension]

Well my lil fjord village has suddenly grown into a small town while I started putting in buildings (it's like some sick compulsion). I've been researching medieval professions and if I put in all the stuff I've come up with then my town will be a full size port city and I'll have to redo everything. Not sure I wanna do that but here is my updated wip and this thread should probably be moved over to the town forum. I'll put in the legend as to what all the buildings are when it's done and the scale is still 1 pixel = 2 feet. Things are going faster now that I've made brushes and layer styles for the buildings and actions to do the shadows (wish I would have done that long ago instead of 2 hours ago). And yes I know my buildings are sitting on top of my trees...I'm working on a flattened image to save my pc from chugging, when the town is done I'll flatten it and stick it back into the original psd file and tuck em up under the trees.

Things to do: finish the town, labels and graphics, tweaking.

[Karro]

Hmm... Things look a little too straight to be a medieval era village. The roads meet at right angles and run straight, and the buildings appear very regular.

It just seems to me that the buildings don't really stylistically line up with the rest of the map. It looks good, mind you. Great work so far...

[StillCypher]

Hmm... Things look a little too straight to be a medieval era village. The roads meet at right angles and run straight, and the buildings appear very regular.

Oh, m'gosh... That's the exact same thing I was thinking! "Too tidy! Too sterile!"

Otherwise, though, you're making enviable progress. I'm impressed.

[Ascension]

I think this fjord has died. I had fixed the "too straight" thing by rotating a bunch of buildings to align with the roads. I had added about oh 100 or so more buildings over the past 2 days then a storm was coming up about an hour ago. My first thought "save it". While the save was winding up the power went out and the file is now corrupted. I can't get it to load up in anything but the lil previewer in windows still shows the correct preview. After 5 days of adding walls, roads, and buildings, then fixing some critiques I am now left with dookey. Will it ever stop raining here in the midwest?! I really don't want to redo 5 days worth of labor because what was fun before will now be a chore. I'm just so angry at being helpless...a stupid 10 minute storm ruined 5 nights. Ah well, c'est la vie, eh?

[Midgardsormr]

Ouch! Even with a UPS, I still like to save into a new file every day. I had about 25 of them for last month's challenge entry. It takes a lot of disk space, of course, but it's well worth it.

[industrygothica]

I think this fjord has died. I had fixed the "too straight" thing by rotating a bunch of buildings to align with the roads. I had added about oh 100 or so more buildings over the past 2 days then a storm was coming up about an hour ago. My first thought "save it". While the save was winding up the power went out and the file is now corrupted. I can't get it to load up in anything but the lil previewer in windows still shows the correct preview. After 5 days of adding walls, roads, and buildings, then fixing some critiques I am now left with dookey. Will it ever stop raining here in the midwest?! I really don't want to redo 5 days worth of labor because what was fun before will now be a chore. I'm just so angry at being helpless...a stupid 10 minute storm ruined 5 nights. Ah well, c'est la vie, eh?

Alas, you're not alone. I feel your pain.

A lot.

[Redrobes]

I think this fjord has died. I had fixed the "too straight" thing by rotating a bunch of buildings to align with the roads. I had added about oh 100 or so more buildings over the past 2 days then a storm was coming up about an hour ago. My first thought "save it". While the save was winding up the power went out and the file is now corrupted. I can't get it to load up in anything but the lil previewer in windows still shows the correct preview. After 5 days of adding walls, roads, and buildings, then fixing some critiques I am now left with dookey. Will it ever stop raining here in the midwest?! I really don't want to redo 5 days worth of labor because what was fun before will now be a chore. I'm just so angry at being helpless...a stupid 10 minute storm ruined 5 nights. Ah well, c'est la vie, eh?

Thats bad We have had some storms here too and some power outages. I also power off and plugs out over storms in case of mains spikes. We might benefit from a thread about backup strategies - always easier to say after the fact I know but I implement a rigorous set of procedures and since losing several HDs over the years I haven't lost my data since. One quick policy tho is that all my WIPs are numbered and increment up. I have a map in progress with 28 file saves so thats a lot of corruption to destroy them all. You could try to look at some of the temp directories as some programs save copies of the file in case of an outage like that. The file might be saves as a different name but it might still exist.

[Karro]

Oh man, I'm sorry. I've been there, under different circumstances... Lost tons of writing I had been working on first when I dropped an external hard drive then again a couples years later when my laptop was stolen... Hopefully you can recover and start again.