Greetings Ye Fellow Cartographers !

[Redrobes]

Welcome - thats a big project you have and its looking very grand.

When you say "to get this project (or at least its mapping part) done properly" what kind of map are you thinking of. Are you needing a more realistic terrain or an atlas style map of your world. Are you mapping it in 2D or3D ?

I would be interested in your process that you have formed to create the climate and the flora / vegetation for your land.

Edit - why is it that when I re-read the posts I always seem to get answers to my own questions. Ok so your after realistic mapping. Personally I would then model the terrain in 3D because the height and contours provide huge detail - rivers, temperature, shadows / slope to the sun, etc.

[Guldaroth]

Glad to be aboard !

@ Redrobes: The problem I have is to realize a realistic heightmap for further 3D mapping. I was first working with Photoshop but I wanted to have the map more precise so I used Illustrator for vector drawing. But now I'm stuck with vectorial contours and when I turn the picture into grayscale heightmap my mountains just look like stairs...

I should have known that I was forgetting something... If someone is interested and if french language is not a problem for you, just ask me and I could grant you access to our Wiki where all the finished work are... (I can also translate some parts if somebody's really interested).

[Redrobes]

Glad to be aboard !

@ Redrobes: The problem I have is to realize a realistic heightmap for further 3D mapping. I was first working with Photoshop but I wanted to have the map more precise so I used Illustrator for vector drawing. But now I'm stuck with vectorial contours and when I turn the picture into grayscale heightmap my mountains just look like stairs...

I should have known that I was forgetting something... If someone is interested and if french language is not a problem for you, just ask me and I could grant you access to our Wiki where all the finished work are... (I can also translate some parts if somebody's really interested).

Ok, a GIS program is ideal but you can get from the stairs effect can be smoothed out if you have enough contours. Since you are in Illustrator then you should be able to export them as SVG or some vector format that you can import into a 3D app like Blender. In there you can set the heights up and get it to create a skin over the contours. Or you can create polygons, extrude them and sequentially slice them up to make the skin yourself.

If you have a lot of contours so that they describe the surface quite accurately then you can fill the gaps in alternate black and white bands then flood fill the bands in ascending shades of grey then blur the image to smooth out the stair effect. You need to use a gaussian blur and ensure that its sufficient to leave no ripples between the stairs.

In any case even if you have a 3D surface with stair steps in it you can put the terrain through some erosion filters to make the effect less noticeable. Like this.

Id be interested to see what you have so far on your wiki - the french will be alright for me (mostly..).

[Guldaroth]

Ok, thank you Redrobes, I will try that again myself with Blender or something. In fact I already tried something like this on Vue6 X-Stream but the problem is that I'm just a real newbie with those programs and 3D vocabulary... I shall give it another try and see what happens!

If you want to access the Wiki, here's the address Encyclopédie Svinlir Gûn and I'll mail you the account infos ! Thanks again for your interest and your help.

PS: This was the best I could do on a part of my map with my few knowledges about 3D mapping (it looked so cheap to me that I prefer not to pursue immediately)

[Redrobes]

Thanks for your invite. I saw the relief map you have. Its not too bad for getting the height into something which you can use as a world map relief to calculate temperature and vegetation.

I made this up quickly by taking the relief map and splitting the image into red green and blue and using the red and blue colours got to a height map where sea level is black and mountains are white and gave it some gaussian blur. I then used some gamma adjustment so that the lowlands were flatter.

From there I would use this as mask or template to determine the temperature offset so that if sea level was 20 Celsius then for each 1000m it drops 6 Celcius so that at 3000m it starts to form snow. In hotter or colder regions this would be more or less but you have the temperature map done.

Once you know the temperature you get good feel for the rainfall and vegetation that would grow there.

Then when you have relief, temperature and vegetation you can combine them all to look at which realistic textures to use to map onto the different areas.

[jwbjerk]

Ok, i'm looking through it, and it's kinda clumsy since i have to copy/paste the text into a translate webpage, and then all the formating, links, and context are gone, but i can get by-- though if i stupidly misunderstand something that's my excuse.

The first thing i notice is that you have an impressive amount of astronomical detail, conjunctions, eclipses and so forth.

* I assume you've calculated out these orbits carefully, but i don't see any information on your primary sun's mass-- this is a necessary bit of info for calculating orbits.

Based on the diameter, (2'345'000 km) assuming it's an average main sequence star, i come up with 2.05 solar masses, which according to my charts should be a Class F star, which is not more orange than our sun, but in fact, more white. Such a star would be about 12 times brighter than the sun. The brightness of your sun, and of course the distance of your world determines how much solar energy your planet gets, and thus if it is habitable.

i realize that different sources make different estimations on the masses of various types of stars, maybe this is the result of an equally valid scientist's estimate, but this is different enough, that you might want to recheck your math. Or perhaps this isn't a main sequence star, and you have another type in mind.


* Planets 2-4 are translated "sparkling planets", but they are gas giants right? If so you might want to look at this and the embedded link for information on the probable colors of gas giants in various circumstances.


* The various moons seem to have colors chosen at random, which is fine, if that's how you want to do it, but there are definite patterns (at least in this solar system's moon) that relate the color of a moon to the substance it is made out of and the distance from the sun. Purple and green moons may not be impossible, but they are certainly outside our experience.

Here's an expept from a useful, but unfortunately offline resouce:

And, of course, there's the moon's colour, which is largely a function of what the moon is made of. Moons may be:
Rocky, like the Moon and several other moons in the Solar System. Rocky moons appear greyish and cratered.
Icy, like Jupiter's Europa. Icy moons will be white and bright, since ice reflects light much better than rocks.
Volcanic, like Jupiter's Io. These moons will be red, orange and yellow.
Gaseous, like Saturn's Titan. Titan itself is orange, although most other colours are possible.

(Cached here by the wayback machine)

* What do the starbursts over the currents on the climate map represent?


That's enough for one post. I hope it's useful, and that you don't end up having to redo very much...

[Guldaroth]

Very interesting, thanks !
I'll check tomorrow if I can answer all this but it seems that I'll have to redo numerous things if I want scientific correctness...

Thanks a lot again for all your attention !

[jwbjerk]

If you want to access the Wiki, here's the address Encyclopédie Svinlir Gûn and I'll mail you the account infos ! Thanks again for your interest and your help.

Google translate seems to do a pretty good job, at least with the only accessible page, the welcome page.
EDIT: unfortunately if you log in Google translate won't work, or it logs you out.