July 2012 Entry: Nubesterram

[Nathan Saylor]

Nubesterram: Latin for Cloudland. And if the word 'Nube' is jumping out at you, that applies here as well.

If you have any guidance for me, I'd be glad to receive it.

Google searched this image:

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Cumulus_clouds_in_fair_weather.jpg

[Nathan Saylor]

Here, I cropped the main cloud form. At this point, trying to get an idea of terrain from the cloud form.

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Cloud Map Draft 2.jpg

[Nathan Saylor]

I figured out I needed to boost the size pretty dramatically because some of the coast was pixeling pretty badly by the time I had something like this. It meant starting over, but fortunately it didn't take long to get back to where I was.

Here, I overlaid a green layer semi-transparent and a hydro layer. I also inversed the cloud colors. It seemed to give me a better picture of an elevation model I'm more used to working with in GIS. I jotted down a few ideas for land features.

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Attachment 46547

[Nathan Saylor]

Since I was at work, I decided to try to plug in the negative (would have been better off putting in the original. Oh well) into ArcScene (a 3D modeling program). Game changer for me on this project! Now for how to represent this in the map. The color variations are good, but the palette needs a change. But here, inspiration is taking a better hold. There was a couple days I was just staring at the same screen from my last post.

Will this work okay like this?
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[Nathan Saylor]

Now I'm up to today. Was considering scale. I had an idea about how big I wanted this to be, but I needed to know how features should be represented at that scale. Took a look around Google Earth and Nova Scotia Canada caught my attention. My island will be about 400 miles wide I think. NS is about 350. Then I found http://www.novascotianature.com/habitat.html and was pretty happy with the diversity of its nature and landforms. A precedence is set, so I feel I'm moving in the right direction.
I also read CG Guide on Fantasy Cities 2nd Ed by R Shankar I found here somewhere (sorry I don't have a link if someone recalls how one can grab that). I'll try to review it again before I post a final map since I think there are things I'll need to be mindful of. A great read on urban development and representation, though I think at my scale, that won't come into too much play.
I'm a bit reluctant to move further because here is where the real learning curve is going to be coming in: brushes and artistic representation. Paint.NET is all I'm really comfortable with, but I think I'll have to move out of it before it's over.

[Gidde]

Great starting cloud, looking forward to see where this goes!