Software for 2D star empire maps?

[Øystein]

I'm looking into options to create some more stunning maps than I currently do in Adobe Illustrator, and am looking at software to create a good 2D star map.

It needs to do borders (autogenerated would be awesome but we can all dream) and system labels.

I already have a dataset of 3500+ planets (X, Y, Name, OwningEmpire (stellar type)), which I would like to import.

I've looked a little at AstroSynthesis 3.0 (which seems to only do 3D...) and just got Cosmographer 3 from Pro Fantasy which looks a bit promising.


Examples of maps I've made before and which I'm looking to emulate the look of are:
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/...3025-fancy.jpg
http://home.ifi.uio.no/oysteint/btec.../ROTS_3130.pdf
http://home.ifi.uio.no/oysteint/btech/maps/IS_3130.pdf

Any tips?

[Midgardsormr]

Big job. I know CC3 / Cosmographer is scriptable. It should be possible to construct a script to read in your data and populate a map with that information. Then it would just be a matter of making adjustments for aesthetics. For instance, unless you go pretty deep with the code, you'll probably need to untangle overlapping labels.

Or you could use a similar approach with Illustrator.

Borders would be a more challenging task, but fortunately, a lot of the work may already be done if you can find a Voronoi tessellation script already made. More likely for Illustrator than Cosmographer, of course: http://scriptographer.org/scripts/in...-tool/comments