Errispa

[Straf]

A bit about celestial directions and things that you may want to consider. Or not.

http://www.hollyi.com/articlesNart/01sunmoon.htm

[Mouse]

It's looking great Mouse! The land shapes are really attractive and I like the colors so far. Can't wait to see where you take this!

Thank you Daniel

I was only intending to take a short break away from my City map to allow the creative juices to gather a bit more, but this one seems to have 'got' me now

Tis awesome Mouse! I have to learn how to do this kind of mountains. I have downloaded the G.Projector you said you used ? But it seems i have to have some images for that? I wanted to download fractal terrain but its not free. Are there any alternatives ?

Looking forward for the next update.

Thanks Voolf

Just to recap...

So far I haven't really done any drawing at all. The land forms were exported as an equirectangular bitmap from Fractal Terrains 3, which uses fractal equations and a random generator to generate random worlds. You can adjust the parameters of the world (size, climate, tilt, the type of fractal used etc), and then all you have to do is keep clicking the next world button until you get one you like. Once you have that you can edit the world if there are bits you don't like by painting more or less land directly into the world. Its a very powerful piece of kit. The only drawback is that the climates it generates do not take account of currents in the ocean or atmosphere, and so can only be used as a basic guide as to what kind of ecosystem you might get without them factored in. But you can paint the ecosystems on to the terrain, just as you can paint more or less land into it, and adjust the rainfall and temperature, so that you could theoretically use the Climate Cookbook to adjust the basic information that FT3 generates. I just haven't really worked with that part of the software yet.

There are lots of other things you can do with FT3 (like change the projection, just like you can with the piece of NASA software I was playing with before), and add bitmap overlays for ground and atmospheric effects. I haven't gone that deeply into it, though I suspect it might be quite useful if you were a cosmographer mapping a series of solar systems. Usually I use it in a very basic way to generate more interesting coastlines than I could come up with just by drawing them on a piece of paper. This is the first time I've used it for a bit more than that.

This is the actual base map I exported from FT3:



The raw mountain data from FT3 is in its un-eroded state, so I exported a height map of the projection from FT and imported that into Wilbur. This is the exported height map from FT3:



And this is the greyscale 'light map' exported from Wilbur after the erosion and flow incision, with the ocean masked out and made transparent in GIMP:



I put this into the NASA projection software and projected it in the same way I did with the original FT3 export, to create two transparent land shape bitmap fills that I could then use in CC3 with an overlay effect on the two hemispheres of the map:



NB - The export from the NASA re-projection was all in one image and had no transparent background, so I had to work a bit more in GIMP to achieve what I wanted.

The spherical shading on the CC3 map is done using a sheet of solid reddish brown over the top of all the other sheets, with an edge fade inner effect on it to give the map the appearance that the hemispheres are rounded rather than flat, but that's an optional effect.

The edges of the CC3+ map where all these things come together from separate sources are very untidy because of all the different things I did to it, so the topmost sheet (layer) at the moment is a solid mask - the so-called 'background' paper texture), on which I will draw the decorative elements of the map.

You are right that FT3 isn't free, but whether you buy it or not for what is really a very modest price considering what it can do (less than £30) is really down to whether you want or need the facilities it offers. Wilbur, of course, is free, so you could produce your own height map in PS or GIMP and do it that way. The only critical part you need to remember if you cut FT3 out of the equation and use PS or GIMP instead, is that the equirectangular height map you will need to generate for the NASA software to work properly is exactly 2x as long as it is deep, and that the polar land masses are massively distended east to west.

A bit about celestial directions and things that you may want to consider. Or not.

http://www.hollyi.com/articlesNart/01sunmoon.htm

Thanks Straf I will have a look at that a bit later today when I have more time. Right now I need to break off and go make dinner for more than just one person...

[Voolf]

Wow that is a long answer !
Big thanks Mouse. You must have spent a lot of time for such a detailed respone. Much appreciated. I will save that info, i so much like those kinds of maps but never knew how to create those nice height maps.

[Mouse]

No problem, Voolf. I always enjoy looking at your maps, and I envy you your mountain drawing skills probably just as much, if not more. The reason I did the relief the way I did was because I'm not as skilled as you are with relief shading! LOL!

If you want to see a map that is done in Wilbur and PS without using Fractal Terrains have a look at this classic tutorial by Arsheesh

EDIT: and if you do decide to go ahead and splash out on Fractal Terrains (which cuts out a lot of PS work by presenting you with an instant height map) this is a very useful tutorial written by Waldronate... I think! It doesn't tell you how to use FT3, but it contains some extremely helpful settings to generate better/more useful worlds.

EDIT 2: For anyone wishing to create a rotating globe like the one in the first post on this thread, I wrote a very brief and amateurish tutorial here. But this does require that you have Fractal Terrains and GIMP.

[waldronate]

As a minor point: you can pull data from FT3 to Wilbur and back again. See the "There and Back Again" tutorial at https://cartographersguild.com/showthread.php?t=29412 for more examples. FT3 will also allow you to take the shaded image and make it into an image overlay (Image Overlays>>Show Overlay Window; Add button), which will respond to any of FT's projection operations. You don't necessarily need to involve G.Projector.

[Mouse]

Thanks Waldronate

I realised I had done it a very long and peculiar way around when I finished it, but I didn't know a thing about anything when I set out, so it was all very experimental. I haven't used overlays before in FT3, so I didn't even think of doing it that way. Experimental work methods that aren't necessarily the most efficient way of doing things seem to be my trademark! LOL!

Thanks also for that extra script for the Azimuthal Equal Area (Two Hemisphere) projection, and all the other extras you gave me to make it possible directly from FT without the NASA software. The truth is that I had already more or less finished the process I describe above before that point, and for some strange reason my version of FT3 was missing the crucial projection instructions at the time of looking for it (which might have been down to the way I had installed FT3 in the first place).

For anyone else about to install FT3, it is absolutely crucial that you right click the installer and 'install as administrator' - especially if you are unfortunate enough to have WIN 10 on your machine.

[Mouse]

Been playing around with ocean temperatures in GIMP - starting to work out the climate. Think I should have entered this to the Map it Wrong contest. There's no scale, no title, no indication of what the colours mean - nothing. In fact its not really a map but just a picture masquerading as a map. What it's got, though, is a record of my thoughts on relative hot and cold areas in the ocean, which will affect how much weather moves inland along shores where the wind direction heads inland. It also shows where colder currents forced up into warmer climate areas will bring rich fishing - places where the settlers might want to be for easy food, at least to start with.

[Lyrillies]

Well, you could still add all of that Having a climate map is quite a handy thing if you want to flesh out the world a little more later.

[Mouse]

I think this will only ever be a sketch. The wind flow diagram will also only ever be a sketch. Both these things are being done simply to help me work out where to put the forests, the deserts and the ice

Its not very sophisticated, since it relies on me reading the Climate Cookbook, and I am notoriously dreadful at reading things that are more than a paragraph or two long. (I have an eye floater problem that makes this difficult). I'm much better at absorbing pictorial information, so I'm relying on comparisons between real world data expressed in diagrams, and what I'm drawing on the screen.

[Mouse]

I've spent ages and ages looking for just the right font, and then spent hours messing around with the effects (which still aren't quite right). I've also added two smaller discs, after examining vintage double hemisphere maps on Google. I think I'm right in that you can put what you like in the smaller discs, as long as its relevant.