Jartor - Commission request

[Steel General]

I'd say it's coming along pretty darn nicely so far.

Just an idea that may help with the mountains is possible reducing the magnification of the texture. Not sure if it will make a difference or not.

[ravells]

thanks SG....I've brought it down and it looks much better. Also the mountains were a bit too snowy, so I adjusted that on the base texture for the pattern...work so far:

[ravells]

last post for the night (bit of grass texture and some other little bits)...I'll carry on tomorrow.

[Ascension]

The only thing missing, to me, is any real sense of depth. It kinda looks like a big ole lava field with a really large cobblestone street. Might need some shading, dark inner glow, inner shadow, or a bevel to induce the height-feel. But at least it's quick so I guess that's worth something too Good start and I like the previous mountain colors.

[ravells]

Thanks Ascension. At this stage the textures are really just placeholders and the priority is to slap down the buildings. Once the buildings are done, I'll start overlaying textures, blending and masking them.

For the rich areas I think I will have to draw the buildings by hand since you can't really get away with generic blobs and squares. Need to find some piece of software which can churn out interesting building-like outline shapes...'context free' maybe, but I may need the help of someone who can write a simple code for it to do this, Redrobes could probably do it in 5 minutes whereas it would probably take me hours!

[ravells]

Hi Duerma,

I'm afraid my home computer finally expired a couple of days ago - it's been dying in stages for the last month or so. I'm getting a new one, but am waiting until Windows 7 is released in the UK (August) before I buy it as I don't want to use Vista. A friend has kindly lent me his machine for the interim but I'll only be using it for office stuff and browsing, so I'm afraid this project will be on hold until my new beast arrives (sorry for the inconvenience).

best

Ravs

[Jykke]

I heard that if you buy a computer with vista now, you get a free upgrade to windows 7 when it is released. Atleast there should be a microsoft campaign like that going on.

[ravells]

Yes there is, but I've just read in PC Pro that there's a spat going on between Microsoft and the EU on the upgrade. It says that the upgrade will only be shipped in the EU in 2010 so only the full version will be available here. See this link.. Installing the full vesion will mean reinstalling all my software and I don't want to have to do it twice for the sake of a couple of weeks.

[Alfar]

That sucks, dude. Crashing computer is evil.

[ravells]

Yeah, I think the motherboard is fried. When I opened it up there was a big glob of melted white plastic on it (I still don't know where it came from). It still ran (after a fashion) it would mysteriously switch itself on from standby so I had to turn it off at the socket. Over the last few weeks it just began to get more and more erratic (CMOS rearranging the harddisk boot sequence for no apparent reason was one of its other tricks). Then it finally gave up the ghost yesterday. I'm having a friend install a new MB and processor and will use it as my second puter once it's better. Although 5 years ago it was cutting edge it's a bit pedestrian now, so I thought I'd treat myself to a high spec machine as my main one.

I'm surprised my wife didn't think I sabotaged the old one so I could get a new one