Sunday, February 24, 2008

Bad luck

Well, guess what. About two weeks ago, my computer crashed. I quickly bought a new one, and it arrived more quickly than expected. However, after taking a couple of days reinstalling all my software, I would randomly get the infamous Windows blue screen of death and the computer would reboot. I've been doing everything I could to try to figure out what was wrong with it so I could get it back up and running, but with no luck. Finally, today, I cut my losses, formatted the hard drive, and reinstalled the operating system. I'm still in the process of reinstalling my old software, but I at least now have the essentials (Firefox, Microsoft Office, and Adobe Creative Suite) on there.

In the meantime, I've been searching for high[er] resolution images to use in the graphic. Here's what I need, as well as the progress on each:

Grassy ground texture - Found one that should work, but I can't yet tell without the rest of it. I plan on cropping out the ocean and zooming in a little bit. It will look a lot better once I change the perspective in Photoshop.
Mountain 1 - I found one that looks good overall, but its colors definitely need some tweaking to make it fit in with the ground texture.
Mountain 2 - (Still looking.)
Earth cutaway texture - I found two, and either one should work fairly well. Once I get the rest of it together, I'll try them both and obviously go with the one that looks better.

The mock-up I created before took very little time, as lower resolution images are much more easily accessible. Finding high resolution images of ground texture (from aerial/satellite photography) and mountains has [surprisingly] proven difficult.

I even asked my dad, a longtime United States Geological Survey employee, about finding something that would work for the ground texture, but he said that most of what's readily available is of rural areas, which isn't what I want.

After going through literally thousands of images on Google Images, I found one (a ground texture, that is) that should work.

I've attached all the images I've found so far.




1 comment:

Kathryn Northcut said...

Sorry about your computer, but good job with some images that may be useful - keep going!