Sunday, November 30, 2003
A bluer, drier, Gelion
 
Too much water, said Lynda, and I had doubts about that sky, so here is Gelion Mark II.


Friday, November 28, 2003
Friendlier clouds
 
Lynda found the clouds in my first picture of Demora a bit sinister. So with some more tinkering around with Terragen, and installing the GIMP so I could image-edit, here is Demora Take 2, with clouds and a lake. I'm having a bit of tussle with the surface-map ... when I try to start the flowers a few m above the water, so the lake actually looks like something that has been there a while rather than a flood, the flowers all disappear. And when I try to make the clouds 3D, they get big and sinister again. Stay tuned ...


Tuesday, November 25, 2003
New review of TP
 
From Heartland Reviews (intriguingly subtitled Scientifically-based book reviews from the heart), a "five heart" review of Throne Price.


Sunday, November 16, 2003
ORU landscapes
 
Lodged in a hotel room, in November, in Washington, with 3 statistics textbooks and a computer with Terragen on it ... you can guess what I did. Attached find four non-artist's first impressions of landscapes in the ORU.

Barmi: had me fussing a great deal trying to smooth out the bumpy ground and get some even grass, to give the impression of some habitable space
Demora: was probably the easiest one of all; I have another image with drifts and drifts of white flowers. Tried putting a lake in but could not get it right
Farhome: is probably the least satisfying at present. It's striking, but it does not look habitable
Gelion: OK, maybe the sky is a bit too much a poisonous green, but I'm tolerably pleased with the rocks.


Sunday, November 09, 2003
Snow
 
I have snow. Gone a small way towards figuring out the surface maps function, and getting the snow at the correct altitude. It's amazing what pretty results some random stabbings at the computer can have ...

Now if I could just persuade Mozilla and Blogger to like each other. Mozilla displays the pop-up windows with their contents incomplete, and on no-scroll.


Saturday, November 08, 2003
 
And while I was map-drawing and hunting around for the shapes of things, I came across a gallery of photographs of earth from space, courtesy of NASA and various shuttle and ISS astronautes.


 
While rummaging around trying to find a program that would let me draw maps painlessly (Maps of imaginary places, btw. On a Mac, wot) I came across Terragen, which is a scenery generation program, currently around about version 0.8. While its creators are creating it, they're letting all and sundry use it, free. (There's a version for registration as well, with extra features). It is, for these days, a little program, 2.4 MB for the Mac, doesn't require a lot of user-sophistication, at least to get started - you can go in and poke buttons and it will create a terrain from scratch, randomly modify details of water color and transparency, atmosphere color and transparency. It creates basic landscapes, without man-made features. There are promises of vegetation and other goodies in time, and there seems to be an active user community. I can't yet persuade it to recognize surface maps, or I'd have ice and snow in this, my first doodle:



 
If you click on the title you ought to be sent to the new workshop page.


Monday, November 03, 2003
 
Check out http://www.okalrel.org/workshop/ for details of the up-coming writer's workshop in Prince George.


 
I realized today that there is no actual bio of Lynda on the site - so there is now. Click in the middle of the picture on the home page.


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