15 - [Inner] The Ward of Erahum [Mouse]

[Falconius]

If that external HD is the only copy of the writing you did, perhaps you should back that up to something else? Or print it? Or put it into Dropbox? Seems risky to me.

[Redrobes]

I have a docking station where you plug in raw hard drives (no lead, not USB etc). It was very cheap but now I can use loads of old hard drives as backups. If you have valuable data on one hard drive you are running the gauntlet. You have to compare how much you value that data with the cost of a new hard drive. Definitely back that stuff up ! I have about 5 hard drives or so with important data on it like photos etc and I spread them about and not keep them all in one place. I have an external USB hard drive on my shelf which I use about once per week where I just plug it into the USB and hit a script widget and it backs up all my important dirs. You can get web space like drop box to use, or google drive or whatever. Just zip up everything you want to store, then encrypt it then upload it.

As for the USB stick, yes its flash based so no moving parts / you can spill coffee on it etc. Also they are tiny so you can keep it permenantly plugged in and it wont hinder the laptop at all. By moving the swap file on to it the most common form of slow down from using large images are then moved to a flash based drive.

I dont think you will need to change the split for RAM from system to graphics card. That sort of thing is useful for 3D gaming etc where you have a lot of textures and need to transfer them about. The system sometimes makes a copy of the texture before sending it up to the card. Gimp and most desktop apps wont use the graphcis card to do a lot of work. Blender would be an exception tho. Dont know about CC3+. I know my app was written especially so that it did make a lot of use of the graphics card which is why it went fast but it was unusual in that respect.

So my advice is make a priority of getting a backup of that data and try to keep it on a drive that is not part of your PC - an external USB is easiest but you can use a pen drive or something else. Maybe buy a USB pen drive which is a bit bigger than you might need and keep a copy of the most crucial stuff on it as well. I have lost valuable data in the past. I used to have several HDDs in my PC at the same time and back up from one to the other. One day the PSU blew up, smoke came out of it and everything was fried. All of the HDDs and the motherboard, the whole 9 yards was lost. Never again.

I couldn't comment about Win10 doing odd things with your memory. I have given up on Windows now. Its just too much hassle. Whilst the UI experience is sometimes better than linux, just about everything else, especially system stuff, is so much of a pain I cant stand it any longer.

[Falconius]

I have lost valuable data in the past. I used to have several HDDs in my PC at the same time and back up from one to the other. One day the PSU blew up, smoke came out of it and everything was fried. All of the HDDs and the motherboard, the whole 9 yards was lost. Never again.

Ergh... I can't decide I I wanted to hear that or not...

How did the PSU blow up and how did it fry the HHD's? Did it surge the power to them when it fried? That sounds expensive.

[Mouse]

LOL! I've never had the money to have more than one functioning PC before now, and something similar happened to my last desktop. The cooling fan failed when I was sleeping through an 18 hour render of a Blender animation scene. I too had smoke, and nearly set the flat on fire!

Anyway... back to the map...

I'm still working out the exact technique to use. I was working on the map in GIMP last night and once I got to grips with this mask idea it occurred to me that I could do this like a painting in textures - making use of the fact that the GIMP map is a bitmap rather than a CC3 vector drawing and actually have flat plates of all the textures I'm going to use stacked up and invisible, then simply paint everything into existence like I would with oils on a canvas.

Now I just need to work out what order to stack the texture plates in to make this relatively easy, and render the textures from their existing sheets in CC3 (to keep all the scale and HSL adjustments I've made in CC3)

EDIT: As for the current situation with data storage, I might reconsider the suspicious regard with which I view all Cloud arrangements, since that would be the most permanent way of protecting it (even if its not the most secure)

John - thanks for that advice. I will see about putting it into action later today

[Redrobes]

How did the PSU blow up and how did it fry the HHD's? Did it surge the power to them when it fried? That sounds expensive.

I was sat there then BANG and the magic smoke that makes the elves work so hard came out and then the elves went on strike. Even when I housed those striking elves in a new facility they didnt want to go back to work. And yes, hiring some more elves was quite expensive. But they were quite old so I found some younger ones who were willing to work hard so long as I provided them with a cold bath.

LOL! I've never had the money to have more than one functioning PC before now, and something similar happened to my last desktop. The cooling fan failed when I was sleeping through an 18 hour render of a Blender animation scene. I too had smoke, and nearly set the flat on fire!EDIT: As for the current situation with data storage, I might reconsider the suspicious regard with which I view all Cloud arrangements, since that would be the most permanent way of protecting it (even if its not the most secure) I will see about putting it into action later today

You can get a raspberry pi for £4 now. Alright, you need a keyboard and some leads and maybe a monitor if you dont have a TV compatible etc but thats pretty cool. I have been buiding up a couple this year and last. Ok I dont think they would work with Gimp on a large map all that well and I would not recommend them for a laptop / desktop replacement for any number of reasons but they are cool bits of kit. I have been porting my app to linux and I have run my dice app on them ok, VDale has a ways to go but it runs under wine ok but you need the desktop environment for that. But more generally, PC prices have come down to amazingly low levels and the memory prices per Gig is really low. I think its only the Windows bloat that means you need a 16Gb ram machine or whatever. 4Gb should be enough for most things as a 16K pixel square image uncompressed is 1Gb. But other people seem to do things differently to me so YMMV.

Encrypt your zip file and load it to dropbox and you will be fine. No security issues then. I personally dont use cloud storage either but if I was stuck and needed to back up data that is what I would do.

[Mouse]

Thanks Southern Crane

I'm not really that good at it either, as it turns out - that was a pure fluke!

I've been working and working on the base map in GIMP, and apart from crashing GIMP several times (yes, guys - GIMP is more crashy than anything CC3 has ever done to me) all I've been able to produce is this, which isn't anything like the last test piece.

There's no relief shading or shadows on this piece yet, though, so it may improve significantly when I figure that out

### Latest WIP ###

Errahum_05.JPG

The other thing - the long grass texture is way too big here, but most of that will be covered with city and trees, and anything that's left shouldn't look too bad. The reason I got it so wrong was because I created the texture sheets that I used in GIMP by exporting rendered areas from CC3 and importing them into GIMP to work with. I will do better next time

[johnvanvliet]

Crash ???

even on my old almost antique 16/17 year old Pentium 4 box gimp almost NEVER crashed , even on MicroBpeep's XP
and has NEVER !!!!!! on my newer 5 year old computer

Gimp 2.6 and 2.8 have never once crashed

now a few times I( all me ) forced a hard kill do to something taking more time than i had

Now on a windows operating system i DO expect windows explorer( the desktop manager) CRASHING once or twice EVERY DAY

as to shading , are those plateaus and mesas ?

they are a bit easier than mountains

[Mouse]

Well... it crashed. Twice in the last 5 hours, and at about the same point each time. Mind you, each layer was about 3 GB

The thing is, that what I've done so far is actually doable in CC3+ - all except the highly variable fading of the stone through to the grass, and none of it would have crashed CC3+

I'm trying some extremely rough shadows drawn directly onto the GIMP background in CC3+ here:

Shadow sample.jpg

Those are plateaus and mesas - mesas where the edges of several levels of plateau coincide

[Rongar]

Good morning!

It's early and I'm just about to finish my first cup of coffee, so whatever I say right now can be affected by morning dumbness, but ... 3 GB per layer? What the heck, lol. That doesn't sound right, to be honest. Maybe the whole project is 3 GB? I usually import textures worth 3-5 mb and that's what I'd consider pretty huge already. 3 GB would be pure madness. I think a project roughly the size of 9000x9500 (that was about the resolution you were working at, right?) with just a few layers (10-20?) can be roundabout 3 GB big, at least that's what GIMP tells you. The actual .xcf-file would probably be about 800mb.

Anyway, the texture blending of the grassy areas looks good, the transition from grassy to stone seems a bit abrupt, though. If you're working with a layer mask (and I know there's nothing you love more than layer masks ), you can select the mask and apply a gaussian blur to make it blend more seamlessly. Or you can use the smudge tool and "blur" the transitions by hand, which allows for more freedom. The stone texture looks like it's set to overlay, by the way, which kind of corrupts your line work. If the line work is on a separate layer with an alpha channel (meaning the layer consists only of the line work and nothing else), you can move the layer above the overlay layer and it should be solid black again.

[Mouse]

Hey Did I forget to say that I am... completely and genuinely... totally mad?

not quite 3 GB.jpg

Note the 2.6 GB down at the bottom for just one layer. And this is the trimmed down version I created after the previous version crashed. I had to give up with the 7 layer version!

EDIT: I haven't shaded it yet, but the abrupt edges are cliffs. I have been staring at loads of satellite imagery of a karst area in southern France. The vegetation goes nearly but not quite up to the edge most of the time, but the cliffs are visible by the emergence of the stone, and then the abrupt edge of that stone. I'm hoping to improve on everything as I continue to work on it - once I've got the hang of NOT crashing it! LOL!

Thanks for the tip with the Gaussian blur. I shall try that when I need it. All this is still whirling around in my head at the moment - trying to find a place to settle among all the other bits and things of 50 years learning

The actual file is 800 MB. The one that kept crashing was 2.6 GB

Oh yes! Good morning to you too! (Though I've been up all night trying to master this, and will be going for a nap soon