Cruenti Dei world map

[thomryng]

This is a work in process in tiny, tiny steps.

A bit of background: Cruenti Dei is a fantasy PBeM that I've been running for several years. The basic idea is that each player is running a country, doing all the sorts of things a country does: trade, ally, war, research, and so forth.

Until recently, the players have been confined to a single continent, Sahûl.

As technology has improved, a new Age of Exploration has blossomed. The players (at least some of them) are aware of three continents now, at least one of which has nations (and thus, new player positions) already present.

It recently occurred to me that the quickie world map I made several years ago was not going to cut it:



So I conceived the idea of putting together a full-colour poster map of the world. Because I apparently go from "easy" to "ludicrous" in just one step.

I figured I'd start by cutting and pasting outlines of my finished continents (suitably reduced) to a single Photshop doc and then use jezelf's first tutorial to put together the coastlines and major rivers for the remaining continents.

Here's a reduced version of step 1: importing the three "finished" continents:



(Note that I'm reducing these posted WIP maps considerably from the actual working map. The final poster will be 24 x 36 at 300 dpi - though I'm considering dropping to 200 dpi to prevent my old Mac from suffering a coronary).

Here's step 2: adding the first of the new continents



At this point, I got hopelessly distracted by the wonderful WIP map that Slylok is working on, featuring a beautiful double-hemisphere frame. I decided right away that I wanted my poster map to have the same motif.

Thanks to the very kind advice of Hai-Etlik (Stereographic Azimuthal projection indeed!), I was able to whip up a version with a twist:



Now to finish those other pesky new continents and marry them to the frame.

And then the fun really starts!