Well, I understood it, but I wont ask Joe to explain Quarks... as they are incomprehensible to me after 4 documentaries and 3 books. All written at high school level.
Ah, quantum physics: the dreams that stuff is made of.
If you haven't read it already, might I enthusiastically suggest The God Particle by Leon Lederman and Dick Teresi? Brilliant, funny, and accessible, it's one of my favorite books.
I'll see if I can locate a copy at a local bookstore, I'm on Win 10 now. Gee this thing is slow. Anyway, I'll be loading CC3 and CC3 Plus on this computer.
Despite broadband shortages I had to upload this image. Its rather small (sorry!) but I've got a bit of a problem.
I have a series of solid colour shapes with very large blurs on them, which is causing a strange sort of stripy appearance, most noticeable in the sky. I'm not quite sure how to cure them. I used an absolutely huge blur (1500 units on a map that is 6000x4000) and then a blend mode - on each of the overlapping sheets. The stripes appear even were there is no overlap between the blurred and blended sheets.
It was the Guild that was eating what was left of my broadband allowance once Microsoft took that massive bite out of it. I can't go there for a couple of days now, or I will end up paying £5-10 just for the privilege of having all those advertisements flashing around my screen! At least I'm safe from that here, and it only takes a few bytes to make a comment.
The Darklands are an area of permanent eclipse. Ethran is a world enslaved by its larger twin planet, Errispa, and is locked in a geosynchronous orbit with its north pole pointing permanently at Errispa - hence, the Darklands. Such a place would be so cold it would be colder than the coldest place on Earth, but the intense volcanic activity (caused almost entirely by the proximity of Ethran to Errispa) manages to heat the local area to just about the same temperature as Earth's polar regions - so no frozen methane or carbon dioxide here If you want to go into that region, however, you must stay close to paths that follow the track of active lava tubes, or you WILL freeze to death in a matter of minutes, no matter what you're wearing. (The Ethrans are medieval, and have nothing more thermally insulating than animal furs). You must also take all the food and firewood you could possibly need for your journey, for nothing lives in the Darklands that might be gathered or hunted for food, or burned as fuel.
The Darklands is not a very original name, I know, but I find if you have too many completely strange sounding names for things in a fantasy novel it gets to be a bit of a chore having to remember what's what and where's were. What with regional names like Blucrene, Akatovi, the Merritites, and Sorrowa... race names like Blucran, Sorowan, Aktan, Merle and Zorrani... then place names like Merelan and Urrowan... and character names like Jerrosar, Matjak, Eonat, Astra, Domar... etc.... I thought it would be best to just keep the rest of it relatively simple
The map is 2 2/3 times taller than it is wide (6000 wide x 16000 tall), so what you have here is a very small chopped off section of the top part. The rest of the map is blank at the moment, but the curved perspective means that the scale will be much larger near the bottom of the map, where the Palace will be mapped out, from a point of view that is very nearly but not quite top down.
The whole map is pretty distorted by having the kind of perspective you might expect on a football, rather than a planet, but the perspective itself represents the field of view of the observer rather than the whole of the planet. The observer is about 10,000 feet above sea level almost directly over Urrowan, with a view that extends northwards to its personal horizon, where the top of the gigantic super volcano, Arthag, can be glimpsed. Arthag itself is so completely enormous that it distorts the shape of the planet to that of an egg, rather than a sphere. Its about 5 x the size of Olympus Mons on Mars, and has sufficient mass to distort the Ethran atmosphere around it to make that something of an egg shape as well.
This is really starting g to come together!!! One small thing, and you probably already know...but the lettering over the ice fields? That white on white makes it hard to read....actually, for me, it's impossible to read....blame my football eyes, but I can't make out the letters.
Posted By: DogtagI especially like the sky, of all things. Very pretty, if haunting.
Thanks Dogtag
Believe it or not the sky was one of those things that took me forever to get right. I kept having render artefact issues with the very large Fade Edge Inner effects I was having to use to grade from black to purple (there were really quite distinctive horizontal stripes all the way through it). I tried a blur, which only seemed to make it worse. I tried a home-made fade strip (created a new texture that graded from black to transparent), but that didn't work. I even tried creating a similar grading strip from black to purple - a ready made sky all in one texture, but that didn't work.
Thought about it over night (I don't really sleep that much), and finally created a black to purple grading strip with deliberate imperfections - a roughened texture a bit like a smooth blanket. Although that finally worked it took me a couple of tries to get the right scale of texture so that when I rendered an image then reduced it by 50% the actual texture disappeared in the antialiasing operation.
The stars are simple circles of white with a faint white glow- outside effect, and the blurred orange line sitting on the horizon is the reflection and refraction of the light generated by the surface magma sitting in the Jerrosar Rift valley beyond Arthag - a bit like the distant glow of city lights, back in the days when we all had sodium street lighting (orange).
Posted By: LadieStormThis is really starting g to come together!!! One small thing, and you probably already know...but the lettering over the ice fields? That white on white makes it hard to read....actually, for me, it's impossible to read....blame my football eyes, but I can't make out the letters.
Thanks Storm
I mentioned earlier that the rendered image is reduced by 50% (a normal practice for graphic artists). This, however, is reduced to 33% the original size to stick within the preferred limits of the forum, which means all the nice dark glow effects that I've calibrated to work so well on the finished map at 50% reduction, aren't working quite so well.
If I wasn't completely all out of Broadband allowance, even as I write this comment, I would have posted the 50% image over at the Guild and given you a link to it.
About the broadband... I've spent most of the afternoon having online chats with Three Mobile reps, and finally managed to get them to alter my contract. It never ceases to amaze me that all these mobile/broadband sales reps seem to think you should be so very grateful for having your allowance doubled at half the original price (4 x cheaper that is). they don't seem to understand that it is perfectly normal to feel ever so slightly miffed with them for not making this offer to you last year, so that you perhaps would have been as much as £200 better off by now.
Because they don't understand this perfectly normal sentiment, you have to spend a couple of hours (while they sort themselves out at their end) quietly fuming away at the outrage, while being all innocence, sweetness and light in the brief interludes of conversation.
Sometimes, I think, reality is a whole lot more warped and weird than any fantasy I might happen to dream up in my attempts to escape it
Oh - and in case you're wondering the new contract can't start till the old one comes to an end, so for the next two days I'm still bleeding money quite heavily at the rate of .01 pence per MB, which is what they charge for broadband beyond the agreed allowance. I did try to get them to write off their losses by starting the new contract today, but it didn't work.
I've just started a new Lite Challenge entry (Bloodrock), so this one may have to sit on the same stack of paused processes as all the Ethran maps for a couple of weeks while I sort that out.
I seem to have caught the mapping bug, even though I swore I would not - that I was stronger than it!!! LOL! How foolish of me!
yeah, it gets ya. Unfortunately my project with WizKids has prevented me from doing maps for my own campaign for a bit between real life and my ever draining job I did get a lot of material in Italy, though. We did some hiking up to Mt Epomeo, which lies at the heart of the island my family is from, and got to see my great great grandmothers house and several other hundreds of year old structures (of which are in some state of ruin) and I got all sorts of ideas for maps!!! I am really glad to be doing the WK project, and proud my maps will be in FLGS and toy stores all across the country, but darn am i jealous of all the maps you all a spinning out!!! I have most certainly lost my title of "Fastest Mapper" LOL
Don't stop the tree project though....i can't wait to get my hands on that symbol set! They were amazing and quite frankly nicer than any other tree in my own collection!!!
Oh Lorelei, it must be wonderful to have your family roots so buried in all that history, and still all there. I only wish I could say the same about my own, but alas, even the schools that I attended when I was young have been demolished and replaced by that repulsive Lego land brick and whitewash monster - progress!
I'm not sure I would be able to withstand the pressure of such an important contract, but I do admire you!
As for fastest mapper in the west - I really don't think you have anything to worry about on that front! It took me a whole day just to get the sky right on this one. And as for the trees? Well, lets just say their somewhere near the top of the 'pending' stack, as I really must get that Merelan City map sorted out and finished
Comments
If you haven't read it already, might I enthusiastically suggest The God Particle by Leon Lederman and Dick Teresi? Brilliant, funny, and accessible, it's one of my favorite books.
I have a series of solid colour shapes with very large blurs on them, which is causing a strange sort of stripy appearance, most noticeable in the sky. I'm not quite sure how to cure them. I used an absolutely huge blur (1500 units on a map that is 6000x4000) and then a blend mode - on each of the overlapping sheets. The stripes appear even were there is no overlap between the blurred and blended sheets.
(I hope I'm making sense)
It was the Guild that was eating what was left of my broadband allowance once Microsoft took that massive bite out of it. I can't go there for a couple of days now, or I will end up paying £5-10 just for the privilege of having all those advertisements flashing around my screen! At least I'm safe from that here, and it only takes a few bytes to make a comment.
The Darklands are an area of permanent eclipse. Ethran is a world enslaved by its larger twin planet, Errispa, and is locked in a geosynchronous orbit with its north pole pointing permanently at Errispa - hence, the Darklands. Such a place would be so cold it would be colder than the coldest place on Earth, but the intense volcanic activity (caused almost entirely by the proximity of Ethran to Errispa) manages to heat the local area to just about the same temperature as Earth's polar regions - so no frozen methane or carbon dioxide here
The Darklands is not a very original name, I know, but I find if you have too many completely strange sounding names for things in a fantasy novel it gets to be a bit of a chore having to remember what's what and where's were. What with regional names like Blucrene, Akatovi, the Merritites, and Sorrowa... race names like Blucran, Sorowan, Aktan, Merle and Zorrani... then place names like Merelan and Urrowan... and character names like Jerrosar, Matjak, Eonat, Astra, Domar... etc.... I thought it would be best to just keep the rest of it relatively simple
The map is 2 2/3 times taller than it is wide (6000 wide x 16000 tall), so what you have here is a very small chopped off section of the top part. The rest of the map is blank at the moment, but the curved perspective means that the scale will be much larger near the bottom of the map, where the Palace will be mapped out, from a point of view that is very nearly but not quite top down.
The whole map is pretty distorted by having the kind of perspective you might expect on a football, rather than a planet, but the perspective itself represents the field of view of the observer rather than the whole of the planet. The observer is about 10,000 feet above sea level almost directly over Urrowan, with a view that extends northwards to its personal horizon, where the top of the gigantic super volcano, Arthag, can be glimpsed. Arthag itself is so completely enormous that it distorts the shape of the planet to that of an egg, rather than a sphere. Its about 5 x the size of Olympus Mons on Mars, and has sufficient mass to distort the Ethran atmosphere around it to make that something of an egg shape as well.
Believe it or not the sky was one of those things that took me forever to get right. I kept having render artefact issues with the very large Fade Edge Inner effects I was having to use to grade from black to purple (there were really quite distinctive horizontal stripes all the way through it). I tried a blur, which only seemed to make it worse. I tried a home-made fade strip (created a new texture that graded from black to transparent), but that didn't work. I even tried creating a similar grading strip from black to purple - a ready made sky all in one texture, but that didn't work.
Thought about it over night (I don't really sleep that much), and finally created a black to purple grading strip with deliberate imperfections - a roughened texture a bit like a smooth blanket. Although that finally worked it took me a couple of tries to get the right scale of texture so that when I rendered an image then reduced it by 50% the actual texture disappeared in the antialiasing operation.
The stars are simple circles of white with a faint white glow- outside effect, and the blurred orange line sitting on the horizon is the reflection and refraction of the light generated by the surface magma sitting in the Jerrosar Rift valley beyond Arthag - a bit like the distant glow of city lights, back in the days when we all had sodium street lighting (orange). Thanks Storm
I mentioned earlier that the rendered image is reduced by 50% (a normal practice for graphic artists). This, however, is reduced to 33% the original size to stick within the preferred limits of the forum, which means all the nice dark glow effects that I've calibrated to work so well on the finished map at 50% reduction, aren't working quite so well.
If I wasn't completely all out of Broadband allowance, even as I write this comment, I would have posted the 50% image over at the Guild and given you a link to it.
About the broadband... I've spent most of the afternoon having online chats with Three Mobile reps, and finally managed to get them to alter my contract. It never ceases to amaze me that all these mobile/broadband sales reps seem to think you should be so very grateful for having your allowance doubled at half the original price (4 x cheaper that is). they don't seem to understand that it is perfectly normal to feel ever so slightly miffed with them for not making this offer to you last year, so that you perhaps would have been as much as £200 better off by now.
Because they don't understand this perfectly normal sentiment, you have to spend a couple of hours (while they sort themselves out at their end) quietly fuming away at the outrage, while being all innocence, sweetness and light in the brief interludes of conversation.
Sometimes, I think, reality is a whole lot more warped and weird than any fantasy I might happen to dream up in my attempts to escape it
Oh - and in case you're wondering the new contract can't start till the old one comes to an end, so for the next two days I'm still bleeding money quite heavily at the rate of .01 pence per MB, which is what they charge for broadband beyond the agreed allowance. I did try to get them to write off their losses by starting the new contract today, but it didn't work.
I've just started a new Lite Challenge entry (Bloodrock), so this one may have to sit on the same stack of paused processes as all the Ethran maps for a couple of weeks while I sort that out.
I seem to have caught the mapping bug, even though I swore I would not - that I was stronger than it!!! LOL! How foolish of me!
Don't stop the tree project though....i can't wait to get my hands on that symbol set! They were amazing and quite frankly nicer than any other tree in my own collection!!!
I'm not sure I would be able to withstand the pressure of such an important contract, but I do admire you!
As for fastest mapper in the west - I really don't think you have anything to worry about on that front! It took me a whole day just to get the sky right on this one. And as for the trees? Well, lets just say their somewhere near the top of the 'pending' stack, as I really must get that Merelan City map sorted out and finished
Looking forward to seeing more of your maps...