Now, I can finally post this. Here is a project which occupied me for February and March. It's a sort-of sequel to the nebula starmap I made for my friend Sean. This is another nebula, but it's intentionally in the form of the Guinness beer Harp logo. Then, it's surrounded by acres and acres of very geeky Star Trek references and science-fiction in-jokes.
The file ended up being a whopping seven by five feet at print resolution, so Blogger can only show the image as a postage stamp by comparison. A couple of months ago, I made a series of planets here on JSVB: each of them ended up as a feature on this map. Then I decided I had to make a big Star Trek frame piece with accurate screens and buttons. My client, Sean's brother Earl, did not ask for most of these things, but I knew he would want them and in the end, he paid most generously for them. Some of the money went to purchasing some good art books, and the rest went into the ever-present, seldom-changing mortgage.
Creating this file, I made any number of mistakes and learned about some new techniques. At the forefront is Photoshop's PSB file system, which is new to me but has been around for nearly a decade. Photoshop PSD files, the default, can only -only- go up to 4 GB in size. PSB's can go to any size in terms of memory space, but have a limit of 300,000 by 300,000 pixels or 30,000 times the size of an average computer monitor.
I have a friend whose life's work doctorate fits easily on a CD-ROM. A single CD-ROM holds 650 MB of data. This picture topped out at 14GB, so he would need 21 doctorate degrees for his work to equal mine, more or less. Put another way, you need 200 million words to fill one GB of memory. This picture is worth two billion eight hundred million words. I'll keep the remainder of my comments more brief than that.
The size of this image repeatedly crippled my graphics card and completely clogged my hard drive with drafts. It took a day after I put the final touches on this project just to get my computer back into good enough shape to play games again.
The printing company I used had no trouble printing a PSB file. He seemed to enjoy printing my creative stuff, but like me, he also enjoys getting paid.
Check out the Nebula map by please clicking here.
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