August 2011 Entry - Fort Pilot

[vman3force]

After getting so much positive feedback from last month, I thought I might start taking part in more of these challenges. Its good for my mapping muscles. Probably wont be able to as much after school starts back up, but I've got big plans for then too, which you'll hear about later.

Anyways, for this one I thought I'd do something kind of personal. I come from North Carolina, home to many mountains. One of my childhood favorites is this very strange one called pilot mountain. It's always seemed kind of surreal, and there are mystical stories surrounding it and the native Cherokee indian tribes.

So I was thinking of that and I've been thinking about Fallout and retro-futurism a lot; I decided to use it as the location for some kind of cold war-esque military station, like a satellite relay outpost or something. A little photoshopping today produced this:

fort pilot 1.jpg

And here's my first draft of the base of the map, using a park guide map and a topographical map as reference:

fort pilot topo.jpg

And I realize that the shadows of the mountains dont match up entirely with the topographical lines - I was using two different maps as reference for those elements so I'll have to go back and negotiate them into agreement with one another.
Its a start, I suppose. Not entirely sure where Im going to go with it, maybe some kind of declassified secret intelligence document or something. We'll see.

[Tony.m.meijer]

Sounds like a cool idea, good luck.

[tilt]

nice... looking forward to seing more

[vman3force]

Did a little more work on the map base today. Added height markers, noodled with a couple other things. Still thinking about the layout of the Fort.

### LATEST WIP ###
fort pilot topo.jpg

[Tony.m.meijer]

Did a little more work on the map base today. Added height markers, noodled with a couple other things. Still thinking about the layout of the Fort.

Interesting, how did you generate that image? Specifically how did you generate the hight-lines?

[vman3force]

The height lines were done in Adobe Illustrator, using a topographical survey as reference.

Little update, added a grid key and a few little icons. The grid squares holding points of interest will be mapped separately from the large map, on a larger scale.

### LATEST WIP ###
fort pilot topo.jpg

[Diamond]

This is a cool idea!

[vman3force]

Thanks for the compliments guys.

Today I added the insets for the points of interest, and mapped out the communications bunker south of the giant satellite dish.

I realized the colors look wonky because I'm using values outside of the range of the web. I'll have to go back and fix that I suppose. Does anyone know how to change color settings to web-friendly in PS after the fact?

### LATEST WIP ###
fort pilot topo.jpg

[tilt]

webfriendly colors were created to make sure your websites looked good on old monitors. The last years however, it normally shouldn't be a problem.

[vman3force]

Well then it must be something else- heres the jpeg file on my computer (left) next to it uploaded on the site (right)
Screen%u00252Bshot%2B2011-08-17%2Bat%2B5.39.23%2BPM.png

See how much greener it is after I uploaded it? Hmm, a mystery...