dnd mapper trying digital approach

[Hai-Etlik]

Orthographic isn't usually a good projection for reference maps (It is good for "locator" type maps like the country maps in Wikipedia). It's essentially a view of the planet from deep space. So so toward the edges of the map everything is "foreshortened" making it squashed looking. You mention wanting to measure distance. I'm afraid you aren't going to make a map covering an entire hemisphere where you can measure distances to scale.



If you want a reference map of a hemisphere, I'd recommend the stereographic projection. It keeps shapes looking nice and recognizable, but distorts their sizes. In this way it's similar to Mercator (They are both "conformal") but it is centred on a point and has maximum (infinite) distortion at the antipodal point (the opposite side of the globe) where Mercator is "centred" on the equator, with infinite distortion at both poles. Those maps that have the two hemispheres side by side are generally done using stereographic projections centred at antipodal points on the equator.




Which projections are best for a continent depends on the details of the shape of the continent and a degree of judgement about which properties and which parts are important. My go to projections for reference maps of continents are Lambert Conformal Conic, Stereographic, and sometime Transverse Mercator. In general, LCC tends to be good in high latitudes, particularly if the extent runs longest east-west. Transverse Mercator is good for extents that are more north-south. Stereographic is good for more compact shapes.

North America:
LCC: Stereo:

Western North America:
LCC: Stereo:

Equirectangular is useful as something to feed into simple software like G.Projector. It's also useful if you want to wrap it around a 3d sphere in a 3D graphic program. It is not a good choice for finished maps though.



Mercator is designed for marine navigation, and it's also useful for zoomable maps on the web. Historically it has been used for reference maps of the world, although it is poorly suited to this and has largely been replaced by modern projections like Robinson and Winkel Tripel.



I'm afraid I'm not too familiar with any of the software you are using. As I understand it, Fractal Terrains has some limited capability for projections, and the rest (CC, Photoshop, and Illustrator) only work in euclidean geometry. Photoshop should have some filters that can pull off what are effectively come very simple projection transformations (Between normal equidistant cylindrical and polar equidistant azimuthal) under different names.

You'll probably want to either, do all your design of the world in Fractal Terrains (I don't know how much this is practical) and then export to your finished projection, or export to an equirectangular/equidistant cylindrical image, edit that in Photoshop to add/edit the features (don't worry about making it pretty at this point) then use G.Projector to convert to your final projection, and pretty up the resulting image.

[Gold]

You mention wanting to measure distance. I'm afraid you aren't going to make a map covering an entire hemisphere where you can measure distances to scale.

...

You'll probably want to either, do all your design of the world in Fractal Terrains (I don't know how much this is practical) and then export to your finished projection, or export to an equirectangular/equidistant cylindrical image, edit that in Photoshop to add/edit the features (don't worry about making it pretty at this point) then use G.Projector to convert to your final projection, and pretty up the resulting image.

Thanks again for continuing to answer.

I want to measure "approximate" distances on the world map. For example something like distance from Hawaii to Oregon, or Maine. Or Oregon to Alaska. It would be nice to know the distance rounded-off to the nearest 100-miles. Does not need to be more accurate than 100 miles, at world scale.

I want to measure somewhat more accurately on the Continent, region, state, and city-state scale. I probably want to overlay a hex-map grid on the state and city-state scales. These distances will be used to measure overland travel -- for example, 6 days ride by horse, or 12 days walking, or how-many-miles.

Fractal Terrains (world software from profantasy) has distance measuring tool, that even works on the globe. You may not know it has this feature. I do not know if the feature is accurate but it seems reasonable enough. It works to measure even on Orthographic map. It actually draws a curved line on the apparent globe surface indicating the start-point and end-point of a distance route. I understand this measuring may not normally be possible on Orthographic, but remember FT knows the mathamatical layout of the world in many different projections.

So I put my custom FT Orthographic, and I overlay a "real world" Orthographic. Now using the Fractal Terrains I measured from the point that overlaps "New York City" to the point that overlaps "Los Angeles" (on my fantasy map, different shape continenent but overlapping land mass at similar latitudes). FT measures some 2200 miles. I expected to see 2400 miles. I think it's close enough. It seems to work in my experiment. I could be wrong.

Later I will post a graphic of this Orthographic overlay, when I feel ready to post and show it here.

In conclusion, if I cannot measure distances on my hemisphere map, that's Okay. I would like to measure it ("How far is China from California?"), but it won't affect the game. The in-game travel will only cover part of a continent, maybe 1500 miles x 1500 miles region size for the maximum travel to be measured ("in a year we travel from New York to Colorado"), and typically more like 20 to 200 miles (to be measured on a zoomed scale map not on the hemisphere map).

You'll probably want to either, do all your design of the world in Fractal Terrains (I don't know how much this is practical) and then export to your finished projection, or export to an equirectangular/equidistant cylindrical image, edit that in Photoshop to add/edit the features (don't worry about making it pretty at this point) then use G.Projector to convert to your final projection, and pretty up the resulting image.

Agreed. You helped crystalize that choice nicely, and I had not thought about the G.Projector method until this thread. Now I will consider that alternative.

As for what I have completed in FT, I probably need to upload images and show you. I feel that the continents and coastlines are good. But FT has zero abilities for adding City, Roads, Political Borders. It only has mountains, oceans, rivers, lakes, coastlines, islands, Climate, Temperature, Rainfall, geophysical features.

Now I need to export various projections and scales out of FT, and into another software for adding Cities, Borders, roads and paths.

In the profantasy software line, they expect you to export to CC3 (Campaign Cartographer, $40) to add Cities, Borders, Roads, and Touchup. I have not found a free demo of CC3 so I have not tested how this works & would like to hear from Cartographers on this site who used the profantasy software to do this. Because I don't have the CC3 instructions, I don't know what settings they recommend for exporting FT to CC3. And I don't know what projection and scale the CC3 map would be (?).

From what Hai-Etlik said, a possibly next step is exporting Equirectangular from FT, import to G.Projector to "pretty up". So would G Projector give me nice features for adding cities and borders and roads? I will look into it.

[Hai-Etlik]

Thanks again for continuing to answer.

I want to measure "approximate" distances on the world map. For example something like distance from Hawaii to Oregon, or Maine. Or Oregon to Alaska. It would be nice to know the distance rounded-off to the nearest 100-miles. Does not need to be more accurate than 100 miles, at world scale.

I want to measure somewhat more accurately on the Continent, region, state, and city-state scale. I probably want to overlay a hex-map grid on the state and city-state scales. These distances will be used to measure overland travel -- for example, 6 days ride by horse, or 12 days walking, or how-many-miles.

I'm afraid it's going to be significantly worse accuracy than that.

Fractal Terrains (world software from profantasy) has distance measuring tool, that even works on the globe. You may not know it has this feature. I do not know if the feature is accurate but it seems reasonable enough. It works to measure even on Orthographic map. It actually draws a curved line on the apparent globe surface indicating the start-point and end-point of a distance route. I understand this measuring may not normally be possible on Orthographic, but remember FT knows the mathamatical layout of the world in many different projections.

Yes, that sounds like they are using spherical distance calculations in the background so it should be reasonably accurate. The problem I was talking about is if you try to measure a straight line distance on the map itself and then use that.

In the profantasy software line, they expect you to export to CC3 (Campaign Cartographer, $40) to add Cities, Borders, Roads, and Touchup. I have not found a free demo of CC3 so I have not tested how this works & would like to hear from Cartographers on this site who used the profantasy software to do this. Because I don't have the CC3 instructions, I don't know what settings they recommend for exporting FT to CC3. And I don't know what projection and scale the CC3 map would be (?).

Presumably whatever they were when you exported from Fractal Terrains.

From what Hai-Etlik said, a possibly next step is exporting Equirectangular from FT, import to G.Projector to "pretty up". So would G Projector give me nice features for adding cities and borders and roads? I will look into it.

No, G.Projector can only reproject and add a graticule. That's it. I meant you could add any features you wanted to the equirectangular map using Fractal Terrains, or a conventional image editor, then run it through G.Projector to get it into the projection you want for the final map, then load it into an image editor again (CC, Photoshop, Illustrator, whatever) and draw your finished map on top of it.