Hi, you's.

[atimholt]

This post is kind of long for an intro, but it details why I came to this site. I'll post in more relevant forums when a couple little relevant projects are farther along.
Hello. I'm interested in maps because I'm writing a book. I'd been wary, until recently, of making a map for it because it ranges all over the globe of its fictional world (I didn't want to worry too much about distortion, especially with how they'd mess up sub-orbital ETA calculations) , but then remembered a couple things I learned from Calculus, 3d game programming, and the capabilities of my graphing calculator. Projecting the surface of a sphere onto a cube (well, actually the reverse) was presented as a good way of getting relatively minimal distortion as regards textures on a sphere, and is easy to do even by hand, if your doing a single point. That, and my globe has no major ocean through which to break, so I'm doing a "cube" projection; 6 gnomonic projections. For local city maps, using a little bit of 3D matrix transformation (and excel, and my wonderful calculator which does all my matrix multiplication for me) I'll use a gnomonic projection with its tangent point in the center of the map.
So, all in all, I'm enthusiastic about maps for the moment because I can finally map my world without hesitation. I'll say more about it when I've got the math all figured out, so I can post the spreadsheets for anyone to use.