Hey all! So I just finished the rather peculiar map dedicated to our newborn, and now I'm off to the regular schedule again.

Well, almost. I should actually continue work on my Dragon's Backbone map (which came to a sudden halt the day our little one was born), but I'm not quite ready for that yet. I've been toying with an idea for a while now, and I wanted to give it a shot before anything else.

The idea isn't new: a map showing the horizon, and with quite some curvature too. I've seen some pretty amazing maps here on the Guild employing that principle, but there was always something off in 'em: mountains that aren't oriented quite correctly, lighting that doesn't really work the way it should... They were awesome, but I couldn't help noticing (and fretting about) those minor imperfections.

While my mapping skills are obviously nowhere near those of the ones that went before, I'm still going to try and have this orientation issue perfectly right.

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So, with that disclaimer out of the way, here's my first stab at it:
Click image for larger version.  Name: Breistyn's Folly (1).jpg  Views: 65  Size: 342.6 KB  ID: 110283

I used a grid to help me orient each of the mountains exactly the way they should be, and used Tissot Indicatrices to help me estimate the excentricity of the mountain footprints - assuming a mountain viewed from the top is a perfect circle. Check out the image below to get an idea of what I mean with that. The tissot indicatrices also helped eyeball the foreshortening of the coastlines, so nothing but good news so far.

Click image for larger version.  Name: Breistyn's Folly (1b).jpg  Views: 64  Size: 342.9 KB  ID: 110282

However, there's another issue I just came to realize: the closer you get to the center of that circle (the actual centre is located at the bottom of the image, so it's just out of frame), the more you're supposed to see the mountains from the top down instead of from the side. I can do sideways mountains, and I think I should be able to draw top-down mountains too, but I can't for the life of me think of a way to transition between the two.

You see? It's interesting! It's awesome! It's a challenge, and I love to solve those. At the end of this process I'll have a map that will probably look half-decent, but I'll have learned something I should be able to apply to full-planet maps too, if ever I get an itch for that type of thing again.