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That's pretty cool. Imagine a bunch of these hanging in my office.
GIMP Script: Mercator to Dodecahedron
Though it may not be particularly useful, I have written a script for GIMP which will map an Mercator projection to a result than can be printed, cut, and folded into a dodecahedral "globe".
The mapping is not perfect, since the faces of the "globe" are flat, but it generally achieves the result I wanted. Note that the original projection should have a 1:1 width-to-height aspect ratio. The actual width of the original does not matter other than larger projections will result in sharper results (the following image used an original projection that was only 320x320 pixels).
Last edited by RobA; 02-02-2011 at 03:31 PM. Reason: Updated link to renamed version
That's pretty cool. Imagine a bunch of these hanging in my office.
“When it’s over and you look in the mirror, did you do the best that you were capable of? If so, the score does not matter. But if you find that you did your best you were capable of, you will find it to your liking.” -John Wooden
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Oh that could be ever so useful. The sample you provide looks like the original image was of low res cos its blurring badly on the globe. Can it handle large initial images to prevent that. We have loads of people here who make world maps which are about 4K in size and I am sure would like to see them as a globe.
I will rep you for this great work.
Thanks for popping in a posting SG!
-Rob A>
My tutorials: Using GIMP to Create an Artistic Regional Map ~ All My Tutorials
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Equirectangular mercator? Those are two different projections.
I was able to create a globe from this NASA image (rescaled to 2700x2700) on my puny 1.8 GHz single-core computer with 1 gigabyte of RAM (GIMP used about 400 Mb during processing) with little problem other than it taking about 20 minutes. I could re-structure the code to require less RAM but there is little I can do about the speed since the lion's share of the time is spent by the GIMP's mapping plug-in (written in C). Most modern processors should be about five or ten times faster than mine.Originally Posted by Redrobes
I appreciate your correction and I have updated the script's name (see original post for links). Please let me know if my terminology is still off or I exhibit any other misconceptions.
I am not very knowledgable about cartography and mainly wrote this script as an excercise to learn how to invoke GIMP's "Map Object" plug-in from a script. The plug-in interface has 49 different parameters which are all but undocumented (I wasted a good portion of a Saturday because I failed to realize that the reference axes were not [1,0,0] and [0,1,0] but [0,1,0] and [0,0,-1]).
Last edited by saulgoode; 01-31-2011 at 11:44 PM. Reason: Added link to hi-res globe image (2.5M)
Just one comment: the dodecahedron is a great choice for a globe. However, with pentagonal faces there have to be many gaps in the flat map. An icosahedron can be used to make some interesting flat maps, http://www.progonos.com/furuti/MapPr...cosahedralMaps So if you did want to take the plugin further, adding icosahedral options may be an idea.
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