Zombie Nirvana Games

Show Notes:

• I had this one done a couple of days ago, but I decided to take one last crack at the encoding thing to see if I can come up with one that’ll be bulletproof in the future while keeping the quality as high as I can get it. Hopefully I’ve found the sweet spot now.
• Getting your forest to look like the ones in the Western Lands map takes time. You’ve really got to build up a lot of (virtual) paint. It’s time consuming, but hey, I never promised these would all be fast techniques! You can save yourself a bit of time, though, if you just go ahead and paint in the area where you want your forest to be in one stroke, then do the sponge technique on top of that.
• There’s still one small technique we have left to do to really finish off the forest, but it’s similar to one we’ll be using on the mountains as well, so I’ll be devoting a good chunk of next episode to it.
• Although you might think just by looking at it that I used a Blur or similar filter on the original map, I did not. It’s a) a pretty high resolution map, reduced in size for the web, which softened it up a bit, and b) built up with lots and lots of layers of color. You could certainly use a bit Gaussian Blur to save yourself a little time, though.
• You might also notice if you look closely that the forests in the eastern portion of the map are a bit more brownish/tannish. I didn’t save my brush in the tool presets, so I had to pick my colors all over again. I like that it has a little bit of variation though. If I had to I’d probably explain it away as a result of different trees being predominant in those areas.

Show Notes

• The only way this episode could have been more annoying would be if someone had trained small animals to gnaw on my nether regions for the last two weeks. Between Labor Day, the flu, and having to record it three times, I can safely say that this one left me yanking my hair. And let me tell you, I don’t have that much to spare.
• In the original recording, I went off on a tangent talking about the Threshold command, but I realized that a) I was rambling, probably due to all the DayQuil, b) I was running short on time, and c) I’d covered it already in an earlier episode and didn’t really need to talk about it again. I kind of did the same thing with the “create a new document of the same resolution by loading a copy into the clipboard” thing, but the Threshold bit was easier to cut without an obvious gaping hole in the audio and video.
• In case you’re wondering, the Stroke layer style wouldn’t have worked correctly to add an initial outline around my landmass. Why not? Well, I used that watercolor brush to add the land color in, and it’s not all at 100% opacity. You get an interesting effect when you combine Stroke and some other layer styles with areas of varying opacity, but it’s not one that’s really appropriate in this case.
• One other thing I almost forgot. There’s another, slightly more involved version of the technique I used to create the coastline. It’s basically the same, but you put the individual “wave” lines on their own layers, and as you go further away from the shore, you increase the amount of Noise you add to each one and decrease their Opacity so that they fade away as they move out.

… I promise this time, though it’s taking a lot longer than I’d have liked. Nothing I can do seems to be working to get the current version I have encoded properly on Revver. My only option at this point is to start from scratch and re-record it, which I’ll do tomorrow afternoon. You’ll miss out on my funny “getting over the flu” voice, though.

If you’re wondering where episode #14 of FCAP is, it’s done and has been available on YouTube for a few days now. However, there’s been a problem getting it encoded on Revver (again), which means it’s still not up on YouTube or Miro. For those of you who can’t wait, just head over to my YouTube page and check it out there; otherwise, you’ll probably get episode #14 and #15 at the same time.

“Frustrated” doesn’t quite sum up my feelings on the situation right now, folks.

As you can see, there’s no episode of FCAP up yet today. I’m trying to shake off the flu right now; besides being medicated up to my eyeballs, my voice isn’t exactly up to snuff. I’ll have to wait another day or two to recuperate before I try to sit down and record #14. Sorry about that!