Mixing hand drawn and randomly generated elements?

[su_liam]

This is so cool. It definitely requires cropping into smaller sub-images. My 1024x512 global images don't show up well on zoom and Google Earth won't take my 8192x4096 globals.

Does anybody know how to do precise crops in photoshop? Without overlap. It looks like GE will take 4096x4096 overlays and no larger.

[jezelf]

You could try out this PS action - might work.

Failing that,

If you know how many you need to chop it up by...

View > Show Grid ( or Ctrl+' ) use your rulers and guildlines then
Edit> Preferences > Grid and place your Gridline and Subdivisions to your needs (might want to check your line colours will be visible over your work)
View> Snap

If you set up your grid line correctly, you could now use the rectangular Marquee Tool to drag select to each section.
Cut and paste into a new document, or use the crop tool to snap on the grid and, if necessary flatten the document, save as something else and then using your history, return back above the crop and start again to the next part.

If you want guidelines / rulers - or the grid is getting in the way...
View > Rulers ( Ctrl+R ) > move your mouse to the ruler, the mouse icon will change. > Click drag and guide from the ruler to your grid and snap it into place.

Continue using both top and side rulers to set guides along your division lines > View > Show > Grid to hide the grid ( or Ctrl+' )

You can then crop/marquee snap to your guidelines without the grid.



hope it helps.

Jez

[Ascension]

Su Liam, that lil world I did up is a 6250 x 3125 jpg, so maybe it's not about pixel size or maybe it's the version of GE...I'm using 4.2.something (haven't downloaded the 4.3 beta yet). As far as cropping, I don't even use gridlines because when you make a selection via grids it frequently includes 1 pixel to the right and 1 pixel below the gridline. I just make an exact square or rectangle of X number of pixels on a new layer, select it (cntrl-click), then dump this new layer and crop to the exact size.

[Aristotle]

Getting back to my initial issue. I liked the concept of mixed coasts, but the more I looked at them the stranger it looked to me. So I've gone with all drawn lines, which may look worse for all I know... but it's consistent.

Continents are basically correct. I may tweak the layout once I settle on a final style for the world map. For now this is just serving as a tool to make sure I know where different regions are in relationship to one another.

[jezelf]

Hi Aristotle

yeah - sorry we got side tracked.

I think your new version does look better. There certainly is consistency , and it more than serves the purpose for which you need it for now. Anyway, if you did want to bring back detail on the the edges you could now put the whole thing through RobA's tutorial and should look consistant that way too.

I like the colouring you have put on too. Much easier on the eye than the white and cyan.

thanks for posting your progress - looking forward to see more.
cheers

Jez

[Aristotle]

Tried messing around with Ascension's tutorial tonight. So many (very different) styles here that I want to try. This one worked alright. I couldn't follow the tutorial exactly as I started with hand drawn shapes and not clouds. I may redo this one, one continent at a time, to tweak some things.

Oh... and this map made my game rig chug. I ran out of memory at one point and couldn't render any more clouds. Of course the image is 25"x12.5" and 500dpi, and I'm sure I wasn't working very efficiently.

[Ascension]

Some pretty interesting effects there in the mountains, I dig em. Might try to get me something like that for plateaus. Good job. Here is what you can do for exact precision while still using clouds. Make a black and medium gray clouds layer (50% gray). Take your original image and put this as a new layer on top of the layer stack. Make a new layer and fill in the continent shapes with white. Name this layer "anything". Delete the original image layer. You should now have 2 layers. Reduce the opacity of the "anything" layer to anything you like above 50%. This will retain your shapes and lighten the clouds underneath. Merge down (ctrl-E) then you can follow along with the tutorial easily.

Also, working on full earths really makes my gaming rig chug too so I only do 1 continent at a time then flatten it and save as a jpg. Once I have all the continents done and flattened it's much easier to make one large blank document and then add each continent in on its own layer, position it, and then flatten the new image too. One full earth I did without flattening anything was 6 gigs so I'll never do that again