Help with globe projection urgently neede!

[Runninghead]

I've been away earning money to pay for my mapping addiction and I've just landed a little job for Disney making a new globe of the Star Wars Deathstar- they'll be printing on to various products- yey!
Trouble is the printing is to be on to 8 gores of the flat materials, which then get assembled to make the globes.

Simple "double square" spherical projection (I've done some globe jigsaw puzzles before like that) isn't going to be sufficient this time!
I have to establish the grid for the flat material first, so I tried Adobe Illustrator's Blend tool- blending the verticals from the gore sides in to the straight central line, then blending horizontals from a half circle to a flat line at the equator (see image) .

I'm not liking the accuracy of what I've done so far though

Any advice?
Or does someone have a grid layout for an 8 gore globe already to share?

Job's got to be handed in in 2 days from now.

Thanks.

[waldronate]

I have an image of an 8-gore stereographic-projection one:

[johnvanvliet]

have a look at the free GPL software " Netppm"
https://sourceforge.net/projects/netpbm/

ppmglobe is part of this tool

see this post here
https://www.cartographersguild.com/s...l=1#post283600
and
https://www.cartographersguild.com/s...l=1#post275835

or for more accurate warping use Qgis and gdal

cut into 45 degree pieces and remap to transverse Mercator

[Runninghead]

Thank you both sooooo much!!
These are exactly what I was hoping for but unable to find despite a lot of Googling.
John- I'd rep you up but I get an alert telling me I have to spread some applause around before I'm allowed to- odd pop up!

Really guys these are going to get me out of a tight spot.
I hate to forge ahead with the detail stuff before laying good foundations and these grids are ideal.

I'll post the projection here late this week and ask for permission to post the final here asap too.
In the meantime here's a little section of my greebles (I'm going to randomly fill my 8 gore map with these to form a non-repeating texture):

[Runninghead]

Just got the first gore artwork done for the new Deathstar.
Here's the projection I'm using (includes a 2cm bleed to absorb manufacturing errors).

[Runninghead]

It went well, just waiting for the prototype to come back from the manufacturer now- thanks for the help!
Getting more work from this too, which is with another client.

Interesting how the Flexify plugin from Flaming Pear did a good projection but it didn't match perfectly with the gores posted above and the manufacturers projection didn't agree perfectly with either!
Small differences but I'm getting the feeling that there's a deal of interpretation as to the optimal approach to this task.

While looking for a Mac version of Netppm I found http://www.avenza.com/mapublisher, which looks good, though far too advanced for me.

[Runninghead]

It went well, just waiting for the prototype to come back from the manufacturer now- thanks for the help.
Getting more work from this too, which is with another client.

I got netpbm installed with some sudo terminal commands but, golly it could sure do with a GUI!
Not sure I've the time to invest in learning it's usage at this point.

Interesting how the Flexify plugin from Flaming Pear did a good projection but it didn't match perfectly with the gores posted above and the manufacturers projection didn't agree perfectly with either!
Small differences but I'm getting the feeling that there's a deal of interpretation as to the optimal approach to this task.
I added a 2cm bleed all round each gore so I'm hoping that'll absorb any errors.

While looking for a Mac version of Netppm I found http://www.avenza.com/mapublisher, which looks good, though also may be far too advanced for me.

[Tris Mzr]

Hi Runninghead,

What program did you eventually use to create the gores for your project? I'm doing a similar project, but can't seem to get the latitude lines correctly. They seem to be squished in instead of correctly formed. My goal is to get a 10 gore globe grid.

I tried qgis for this task as johnvanvliet mentioned but i can't get it to work.

Any help would be highly appreciated!