Anyone know of a Globe Program that supports custom maps?

[Sylrae]

I found this french program Located Here written in Java, that let's you take the earth, and view it with the sea level at different heights. 0 is modern, and you can lower it as much as you want.

It outputs a typical rectangular map.

Here's my question: Does anyone know of an app that will let me take the map and use it as the texture for a globe?

I want to take the map I get when I lower the sea level, and rotate it to put antarctica in the middle.

I think it would be cool to have a globe of fantasy maps as well, so an app that can handle this sort of thing would be useful later as well.

Do you know of anything like this?

[Edit]Apparently this is my first actual post! I've been lurking on and off since June; thought I had posted before this; apparently not.

[ravells]

Hi Sylrae,

I think Fractal Terrains would be able to do this - you can output the maps as a texture with the right proportions to map onto a sphere in a 3d program (or just view it in FT itself), you can adjust sea levels, you can change the rotational axis of the planet (I think) and put Antartica on the equator and you can load DEM data of the real world.

Hmmm I had a play, but although I changed the position of the North Pole to the equator it didn't seem to make a difference to the projections...

[waldronate]

The pan tool in FT has two functions: panning and (when Shift is held down) recentering the projection. If you use the Orthographic projection then the recenter option will let you spin the globe around.

Googly Earth will also let you do this with a custom KML. RobA has a tutorial here somewhere.

[ravells]

Dunno Joe, I've panned and I've panned, but I can't get Antarctica onto the equator.

[Sylrae]

Can you just rotate the camera angle to face antarctica and put it in the middle? Like; look at the bottom of the orthogonal sphere shape?

Anywho; Here's the image I'm trying to do it with. I lowered the sea level by 120 meters. The goal is a map centered on Antarctica (the sphere doesnt matter, but I want Antarctica to be the middle of the map and want it without the warped proportions a refular rectangular map gives antarctica) representing 8 to 18 thousand years ago. Wikipedia tells me that it was about 120 meters lower 18000 years ago, and about 60 lower 8000 years ago. I don't really care what the textures look like, I only really need land/water differentiation.

FT Pro looks like it might be able to do it; but well, I don't have 40$ to fork over at the moment; especially not for something that *Might* do what I need. I'm sure it's a great program, and I'll admit it looks useful, but it's not in the budget at the moment.

[waldronate]

In FT, the recent tool only sppears when you're holding down the Shift (maybe Ctrl, I don't recall right now) key. It will be the recenter tool when the 'C' appears on the cursor in the middle of the hand.

An alternative to FT is Wilbur ( http://www.ridgenet.net/~jslayton/software.html ). It can also do projections from image files. The first two attachments show a 120m sea drop based on the ETOPO2 data set (which unfortunately has artifacts in the ocean near Antarctica). The last one was a reprojection of your image, but the low resolution and white stripe artifact are due my taking a screen shot of the image rather than getting the image whole.

[Sylrae]

Very cool; I greatly appreciate it, and that should do very nicely for my campaign. I'll have to look into FT & Wilbur at some point soon though; it seems. That's some good stuff.

[RobA]

You can also use Hugin (my tool of choice for this)

Here is a mini-tut....

Load up your equirectangular image into hugin selecting equirectangular and a 360 degree horizontal field of view:


In the Images Tab select the image and change its pitch to 90:


Click the preview icon (little map with the crosshairs in the top row of icons) to verify the view (It will be an equirectangular projection with the pitched image):


On the Stitcher tab select orthographic progection (to get a "globe from space" view):


And the result:


-Rob A>