Mixing hand drawn and randomly generated elements?

[Steel General]

RobA has mysterious magical powers granted to him by the Great Wizard Googleweisen, and the Great Wizard Googlewiesen doesn't give up his secrets easy, but RobA always willing to share.

[Aristotle]

I figured it out last evening after seeing what he did. I don't have it on my work computer, so I can't navigate you there directly... but it's under the 3rd or 4th option on the standard menu bar at the top. It's called Apply Overlay or something obvious like that. Zoom all the way out, apply it and then streatch it to fit. You might need to zoom in on the poles to get it snug. That seems to be about it.

I don't know what the ideal size/layout of the file you use should be. If your flat image should be distorted at the poles to appear not-distorted on the globe, etc.. Map projections are too advanced a topic for me right now. My image was sized to 12.5 inches width and 6.25 inches height, so that my earth-sized world would have have a scale of roughly 2000 miles per inch.

It worked, and I have to say I didn't fully realize how large some of my continents would look on a round world.

[jezelf]

had a little play at lunch time. It was way too exciting not to try something! worked out some of it to keep us happy until RobA tells us more

1: sized the map to 2:1 (I used 1000pixels wide X 500pixles high as a test)
2: Open Google earth > go to Add > Image overlay ( Ctrl+Shift+O ) > browse to your file.
3: It'll throw your image over the earth and you'll have green markers. Drag those markers around the globe until they join.
4: In the Layers, hide the overlays you dont' need
5: haven't found out how to do the distances yet but I'm sure the master will let us underlings know soon

here's one of my muck-about maps I used...

[Aristotle]

Looks like distorting the ice cap is the way to go then. Thanks for clarifying the process.

[jezelf]

If any one needs a polar distortion tool...

The map I used was something I was playing around with for this thread. I used a plug-in for Photoshop for the spherical distortion, which you can find here - Spherical Mapping Corrector (if you use PS that is - some of the fractal world generators already distort I think)

[landorl]

I might not have noticed it if you hadn't pointed it out, but now that I look at the map, there is a big difference between the hand drawn areas and the fractalized area.

[RobA]

heh. I never saw the request, sorry.

And I never know the green lines were handles. I just always used the dialog:


-Rob A>

[jezelf]

actually, typing in the dialog gives a better result, the handles seemed to create artifacts for me.

It's a great reference tool! thanks RobA

jez

oh - I found out about about the distances (5: above) simple really! View> Grid
you might also need to turn off any previous places you may have marked using google earth or they will still appear over your own map.

[Ascension]

Here's a lil world I did up to test out this great find. The ruler tool can help you find your distances so that's cool and if you place a bunch of pushpin bookmark thingies on your cities you can spin the world and it will zoom in on your cities and these bookmarks can be shared with others so that looks pretty cool as well. Those plug ins from Jez are interesting as well except the spherical mapping corrector messed up my map (so if your going to use that plug in, don't put anything anywhere near the sides of your image). The first image is a lil world I did up tonight for the test and the second shows part of the globe.

[RobA]

The spherical mapping corrector is just designed to pre-distort a regular tileable texture so when mapped to a sphere it doesn't pinch as badly when mapped to a sphere assuming an equirectangular projection.

If you work with that from the start you will be fine mapping to a sphere.

-Rob A>