Abebe

[Gidde]

What an incredible level of detail! Some of your rivers have strange razor-straight stretches though. May want to soften those up just a tad.

[guyanonymous]

The rivers, yes...their shape is straight from Fractal Terrains. I adjusted placement of each in minor ways, but not actual shape. There are a few parallel ones that run very close as well.

With very few adjustments, everything in here was procedurally done in FT Pro and in Photoshop, and as such could be repeated on another map output from FT PRo (a new version that fixes the straight rivers etc?). In theory after you save out some specific map renders from FT Pro (e.g., water layer, land layer, texture, etc) you could run an action on them in PS and get a map with this styling.

Now that I'm finding a look I like, I'll consider redoing things, but for now the land outline/appearance is 'locked' and I'm trying to figure out a style for labels etc. next.

[guyanonymous]

And thanks for noticing the detail...I think I've found that balance where enough info is given to let you imagine the rest. If I could go down even deeper to 100m...or 10 m.... or 1m resolution I would too...I love pushing the limits.

[Gidde]

Ah, I hear ya. Well, it's a minor issue anyhow. The textures are great, and I like the googlemaps-UI you've got going.

[guyanonymous]

I think most of my texture play started with a tutorial by Tear which integrated the tutorials and experiments shared by others on here. The non-flattened saved PSB file is 22GB+ in size with all the layers in there, but it's basically all modifications of Tear's style. As for the google part - it is google, using this free software: http://www.casa.ucl.ac.uk/software/gmapcreator.asp (the 30000x15000 bmp was set with zoom to 8 which makes ~22000 files and builds the html).

I need to figure out how to place my own icons on it ala google maps as well. I'm hoping that I could create a database of locations/names and code to place all the cities etc.

[Djekspek]

Awesome stuff! a 22GB PS file. Wow! I have trouble with 5GB already when using CS5 (especially when using layer-filters & effects) and I have a rather ok PC.... what hardware specs do you use? btw for custom google map icons, check this site (i used that once and it works ok). cheers!

[guyanonymous]

I've got 12GB of Ram which is better than the 8 I had before, but not enough...next time I can afford another 12GB bank I'll bump up. My biggest issue right now is loading and saving from disk...Most adjustments and tool-bar controls work immediately, but plugin effects range from 5 seconds to never depending on my choice. I have revisions - and when I said I've 'locked down' some of the map, it's because I've started a new revision with many of the layers flattened. Right now I'm working with a 5GB PSB file with the underlying map now consisting of one Normal 100% layer instead of 20 with a range of settings. It's a smidge faster now

And thanks for the link!

p.s., I've got an i7 950 if memory serves, and am still using an old 8800 gtx graphics card.

p.p.s. Your link led me to this: http://code.google.com/apis/maps/art...stomicons.html which has the info I need in a way I think I can understand it. Thanks!

[Jaxilon]

This is excellent and no wonder my machine dogs out. I only have 4gb ram!! dang but I need to build myself a new machine.

[guyanonymous]

Keeping the working memory OFF of the HD is my main goal with upgrading the memory...when it ends up using HD cache as RAM, things get sluggish.

[Gidde]

Thanks for posting that link to the GMapsCreator. I've been looking for something like that! I'll have to play with it and see if I can get it to switch pictures on zoom like Google Earth does with different zoom-level satellite pics. This should let me do it without learning the whole API. Yay!