Creating a Planet Texture

[Digger2000]

Well this is what I have done to try and work out what goes where.

I know ir looks a little mad but I think it will work, I can cut and paste off the original map and set the islands in the areas that now seem to be the plave for them.

[waldronate]

I gave it a little effort and came up with the attached. I unprojected chunks using a Hammer projection. It's not perfect (it's pretty bad in places), but it seems to be reasonable on a globe. I'm not sure how good it is in absolute terms, though.

[Digger2000]

Waldronate thats amazing, thank you so much

[Digger2000]

Here's the first preliminary render to see what its going to look like.

All ive done so far is to clean the map. define the caps and green out the islands, I added the sea colour, but have not created the shallows around the islands.

[su_liam]

Knitted together, the meridians appear approximately elliptical(or quartic or something, but let's not get crazy), the parallels are evenly spaced. If I were forced to shove that into a mathematical projection, I'd go with a bizarrely interrupted Apian II. I don't know of any app that takes arbitrarily interrupted projections(of any sort) to reproject.

My suggestion, rather than trying to reproject or warp or slice-n-dice this map, would be to start with a blank page twice as wide as it is high. Treat that as equirectangular or geographical projection with equally-spaced straight parallels and meridians perpendicular to each other. On that sheet draw, by eye and imagination your best approximation to the island forms on the map, Remember to try to take into account the east-west stretching that will occur as you move away from the equator.

What you get won't be a perfect reproduction of the landforms in the existing map, but they are clearly, themselves, not a perfect reproduction of any land that could exist on the surface of any sphere.

Once you have a master in equirectangular projection, it's pretty easy to find something that will project that into a whole lot of other projections. FT Pro is good for that. If you want to get a lot more technical, Proj.4 is a good free app, but not necessarily easy.

EDIT: I should make sure there isn't a second page before I post .
Both Waldronate and Digger seem to have this well in hand. Neither of these are necessarily going to fit the intention of the map's author, but neither does the author's map so hey... it's .

This map is what happens when graphic designers do cartography . Graphic designers on this board are of course excepted. People on this board pretty uniformly have a respect for maps.

[Digger2000]

Will concentrate on the Islands now, I have detailed maps for all of them

[Digger2000]

When the maps all completed, what format would you recomend to redisplay it as a flat map and is the a programe to do it?

[Digger2000]

This is where I stand atm with the map

[Telarus]

Well Done Digger! Do you have a heightfield (greyscale image)? I could generate a pretty detailed image with (grass/rock/etc) textures for you if you did.



Oh, Hi. I'm lurking around here now. Good to see more of your work.

[jtougas]

Not knowing the first thing about any of the math involved in this I'm just going to say it looks very nice (and go stick my head in a book..a book about math..a book about math and maps...)