Elyden map

[Valtharius]

Fantastic map! A few names askew and difficult to read, but that can be easily fixed. I love the layout. Naming conventions are pretty much spot on. I did notice a few names of places taken from Egyptian mythology. Not sure if this was intentional, or perhaps the civilization in question simply came up with the name without prior knowledge of said god(s) because it sounded right. Personally, I like the heavy paper approach. It reminds me of some of the archived paper work in the Tower of London.

As far as climate goes... that is your call. It is your world after all. We can argue physics, river flow, and weather all we want, but it comes down to what you want. Perhaps there are physics at play that we don't know about. Maybe the star your planet orbits around has a slightly slow rotation, or the star gives off a pulse of solar radiation that causes the weather to be wacky and the climates to be different than our own. That's the beauty of creating your own FANTASY world. The operative word here is fantasy, imagination unrestricted by reality.

Have fun and I am looking forward to more of your work!

~Val

i hope you dont mean plagarised in any way! that's the last thing i want. if you mean it looks sort of like the Mediterranean, theres some logic to it, other than making a map thats somehow familiar (maybe invoking thoughts of the roman empire at its height) I thought that making something similar to the Med would make it easier to determine climate and weather, especially since im haveing a really hard time trying to sort out things like hadley cells and mid-latitude cells and trying to figure out where the rain-shadow would be. of course, all that after foolishly determining where my deserty and foresty places are going to be years ago, which means some of my forests are technically in rain-shadow zones, and vice versa for the deserts, so im either forced to retcon a lot of places climate or finding ways to explains why they ignore global climate rules :s

[vorropohaiah]

Fantastic map! A few names askew and difficult to read

you mean the curved text? I'm thinking of what i can do to fix those (apart from the change in font i already applied to the new version of the map), any tips? Also i wish i could make thicker underlines on some places without having to manually stroke them (that sounds bad...)

I did notice a few names of places taken from Egyptian mythology. Not sure if this was intentional, or perhaps the civilization in question simply came up with the name without prior knowledge of said god(s) because it sounded right.

theres some mesapotamian names (eg. baalbec), greek (eg. parthia) and other obscure places (well, obscure to me at least). some i might change

Personally, I like the heavy paper approach. It reminds me of some of the archived paper work in the Tower of London.

thanks, though i think as this is meant ot be more of a contemporary altas-type map, i'll probably reduce the texture on the paper. I'll certainly use this paper-textur e for other documents and maps i create.

As far as climate goes... that is your call. It is your world after all. We can argue physics, river flow, and weather all we want, but it comes down to what you want. Perhaps there are physics at play that we don't know about. Maybe the star your planet orbits around has a slightly slow rotation, or the star gives off a pulse of solar radiation that causes the weather to be wacky and the climates to be different than our own. That's the beauty of creating your own FANTASY world. The operative word here is fantasy, imagination unrestricted by reality.

this is one of my biggest problems when it comes to the worldbuilding. im obsessed withd etails and trying to make things as realistic as i can, but the world itself is inherently non-realtistic - with the dreams of grotesque maddened gods warping the land; seas slowly drying up and cankers and deformities affecting everything from flora to fauna and the unliving world alike. AARRGH! lol though its decisions like those that i love about worldbuilding

[Hai-Etlik]

The scales, graticules, rhumb lines, and compasses all conflict with each other or otherwise just don't make sense. The one thing that does work is that the large and small scale maps do seem to have corresponding scales. The middle map though doesn't match up. You also have a compass rose and a set of rhumb lines on the small scale map, and then several other rosettes of rhumb lines in other parts of the map, that don't line up with the first set. The large and small scale maps also have rhumb lines and a compass rose in the case of the small scale map, which all means they are bearing preserving, the middle map seems to be using a graticule from an equatorial aspect of an azimuthal projection or a derived projection like Aitoff or Hammer, which are decidedly not bearing preserving. Notice that the meridians aren't parallel lines, that means that north and south are varying. (A note, even if they are parallel lines, that just means north-south is preserved, some projections preserve that while still distorting directions like "northeast").

Even ignoring the mismatch between the maps, the graticule doesn't make sense. As I said, I'm not entirely sure what projection it is, but it's not a projection that would be used for that map. It's hard to say where exactly the map is on the globe or what its true extent or orientation are given the inconsistencies, but it would probably make most sense to use a conic projection, or, if you were going to use an azimuthal projection, one which is actually centred on the map.

Also, if the small scale map really is bearing preserving over such a large extent, then it has to be in Normal Mercator projection, which significantly distorts scale, and so shouldn't have a scale bar.

You seem to be doing curved text using Envelope Deformation. This gives the text a sort of squashed or smeared look. "Text on Path" is a better way to do this. It will shift and rotate each glyph to fit on the curve without distorting it.



Otherwise very pretty, and I like that the different maps show a degree of error between them rather than computer precise replication.

[Gidde]

or for calculating a conical projection based on the equirectangular projection i have created for the world map?

G.Projector (http://www.giss.nasa.gov/tools/gproj...nload_win.html) is a piece of free software that I've found to be really helpful for this purpose. It will project a map from equirectangular to several other projections (including equidistant conic iirc), and has some nice customizations of the projection output.

[vorropohaiah]

G.Projector (http://www.giss.nasa.gov/tools/gproj...nload_win.html) is a piece of free software that I've found to be really helpful for this purpose. It will project a map from equirectangular to several other projections (including equidistant conic iirc), and has some nice customizations of the projection output.

that deserves some rep thanks, ill have to try that once i get home from work. what formats can it save as?

[Gidde]

It'll save as a flat image file (I always save as .png, so I'm not sure what other formats it offers).

[vorropohaiah]

anything that works on PS is fine.

EDIT: just got this from the website:

G.Projector is a cross-platform application which can transform an equirectangular map image into one of over 90 global and regional map projections. Longitude-latitude gridlines and continental outlines may be drawn on the map, and the resulting image may be saved to disk in GIF, JPEG, PDF, PNG, PS or TIFF form.

thanks again

[vorropohaiah]

so, i downloaded this programme and, after some problems getting 64-bit java installed on my laptop, managed to get some maps generated. this is a very fun programme to use and if you have an equirectangular world map i'd suggest using this as it gives you familiar perspectives on your design - and really shows just how messed up the mercator projection really is at the poles

anyway, I settled with an azimuthal equal area, equidistant conic (which are both very similar); orthographic (centered on the Inner Sea; and a Wagner IX (which i thought is easy to look at, if that makes any sense). I still need to do some work on the original equirectangular map to solve the warping in the poles after applying the spherical projections, though i'm pretty happy with the results (though i wish the giss programme would work with higher res images, but that's a minor gripe on an otherwise great little programme

Ill now import one of the first 2 into photoshop and start from scratch building up new layers... so the toil begins anew

EDIT: not sure about this, but i think this thread is probably better-off in a WIP forum. can a mod please move the thread?

[Hai-Etlik]

so, i downloaded this programme and, after some problems getting 64-bit java installed on my laptop, managed to get some maps generated. this is a very fun programme to use and if you have an equirectangular world map i'd suggest using this as it gives you familiar perspectives on your design - and really shows just how messed up the mercator projection really is at the poles

anyway, I settled with an azimuthal equal area, equidistant conic (which are both very similar); orthographic (centered on the Inner Sea; and a Wagner IX (which i thought is easy to look at, if that makes any sense). I still need to do some work on the original equirectangular map to solve the warping in the poles after applying the spherical projections, though i'm pretty happy with the results (though i wish the giss programme would work with higher res images, but that's a minor gripe on an otherwise great little programme

Ill now import one of the first 2 into photoshop and start from scratch building up new layers... so the toil begins anew

EDIT: not sure about this, but i think this thread is probably better-off in a WIP forum. can a mod please move the thread?

That orthographic projection is showing some pinching around the poles. (Orthographic can sort of be thought of as a view from space) You might want to try to fix that in the source map before you do anything else. In equidistant cylindrical/equirectangular the high latitudes should look "Stretched" horizontally otherwise those same areas will be "pinched when you reproject them. Try an azimuthal projection centred on each pole to get a clear look. Since its an issue of shape, Stereographic in particular would be a good choice (It's an azimuthal projection that preserves shapes, but distorts sizes).

[vorropohaiah]

That orthographic projection is showing some pinching around the poles. (Orthographic can sort of be thought of as a view from space) You might want to try to fix that in the source map before you do anything else. In equidistant cylindrical/equirectangular the high latitudes should look "Stretched" horizontally otherwise those same areas will be "pinched when you reproject them. Try an azimuthal projection centred on each pole to get a clear look. Since its an issue of shape, Stereographic in particular would be a good choice (It's an azimuthal projection that preserves shapes, but distorts sizes).

yep, as i mentioned, my next port of call is the equirectangular map to sort out the pinching. I'll likely stick to the conic projection, though will play around with the standard parallels a bit to get something im happy with.