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Thread: Cartography Resources...?

  1. #1

    Post Cartography Resources...?

    Well, heres my first post...

    I'm wondering if anyone could point me in the direction of any good historical cartography resources? I am currently working on a medieval Campaign Setting that could do with some grounding in reality. I'm thinking about town layouts, fortifications and how they evolve - among other things.

    Also, I'm keen to find some data that can be imported into Fractal Terrains to create accurate maps of Earth and Mars? If anyone knows where I can find this I'd much appreciate it.

    Until then, I'll keep looking

    I will be posting maps soon, promise

    Thanks

  2. #2
    Community Leader NeonKnight's Avatar
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    Post

    Here is some info on how Castles and such evolved:

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Castle
    Daniel the Neon Knight: Campaign Cartographer User

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    Administrator Redrobes's Avatar
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    I am not a fractal terrains guy myself but the guy who writes it also writes Wilbur which is a terrain editor - its free and from here...

    http://www.ridgenet.net/~jslayton/software.html

    What you will need is some digital elevation models - DEMs. The best source for these is the USGS site and they have a nice DEM server here...

    http://seamless.usgs.gov/

    So between the two I think you can get the area you want, convert it and import it into FT.

    Mars is a little more tricky. Firstly there is GoogleMars

    http://www.google.com/mars/

    and I am sure that NASA has some topo data for it. Getting the google data into a height map grayscale might be a little tricky - you need to do a gradient remap. I know Image Magick can do that job but I don't know how to do it myself. I have seen the tut here tho...

    http://www.imagemagick.org/Usage/color/#recolor

    For accurate maps of the earth then the NASA's blue marble is a doozy but its very very large at the full res as a TIFF at 52000x26000 - beautiful tho.

    http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/Newsroom/BlueMarble/


    For castles the wiki is a good source. Also for some old maps and pics

    http://www.fromoldbooks.org/

    this one is a good start but I am sure there are a lot more. The pics from this site are usually public domain tho as they are often out of copyright.

  4. #4

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    Of course, there's Medieval Demographics Made Easy by S. John Ross and all the associated calculators others have made to go along with it:
    http://www.io.com/~sjohn/demog.htm

    And also this thread started by Pyrandon has some good advice for building towns and cities:
    http://www.cartographersguild.com/showthread.php?t=828
    Bryan Ray, visual effects artist
    http://www.bryanray.name

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