Ysi Earth world map II

[Karro]

Naturally the picture is of the SOUTHERN continent, do not let the name deceive you, I screwed up. I worked on that file for hours and hours, and I never figured out I'd named the bloody thing wrong.

I also came up with a method to create good poles for maps that are without "human" distortion. You know how, if you draw on an equirectangular or other map projection map, where the poles are hugely distorted, you tend to screw things up so that it looks weird if it's in any other kind of projection. I mean the geography is weird, not glitches, etc. Everything looking "pointy". I came up with a way to avoid this pointyness, using Hugin to do some transformations of equirectangular maps, back and forth. Not very complicated, but Hugin being what it is, I'm thinking of doing a tutorial for this. Any interest?

Oh quite possibly. My own map (theoretically drawn in equirectangular/mercatory-ish) looks horrendous when slapped onto a GoogleEarth globe (as you say, all pointy and stuff). Part of me wants to go back and fix it, but another part of me says: your computer is so slow that it would take you another year of work to fix it. If there's a way to "fix" it without having to actually fix it... well... that'd save time.

[RobA]

A tutorial on doing this with Hugin would be great!.

-Rob A>

[Naeddyr]

It's basically this, I'll elaborate later

Take your equirectangular map into Hugin (as per my other tutorial)



You don't really have to do anything but rotate the image ninety degrees (using the last numerical option in Numerical Transformations thingie in the preview), like so:



Output this, and you have a map of your poles, in Equirectangular. Do your magic on it, then do this whole thing again in reverse, and rotate the image -90 degrees to get the map in the correct alignment, again. there's some distortion, so you might just want to combine the equatorial regions of the original map with the polar regions of the your new map in GIMP, which should give you the best of both worlds. I usually do my cartographical transformations using high-contrast images that I then use as basis of new pictures (drawing over them or tracing them in a vector program), so this isn't the best way to draw stuff on the actual poles except for stuff like landmasses and other thick stuff that can survive the transformation.

[RobA]

This is incredible insanely cool!

I'd wanted to do this for a while and never knew I already had the tool for it!!!!

You can use hugin to remap an equirectangular projection to ANY spot just by typing int he lat and long! Brilliant for generating local maps from world maps and correcting for much of the distortion!

For example, here is the world centered on Niagara Falls:
niagara0000.jpg

And the settings (note these are just sign offset lat and longs for the location!)
hugin.jpg

And one more for the CWBP guys:
cwbp_local.jpg

-Rob A>

[Naeddyr]

Anyhow, some WIP here.

There's a couple of rendering mistakes on the output image, artefacts from Inkscape that can't be helped except through magic. I had the same kind of rendering glitch with another thing. Really weird. If I duplicate the affected items and moved them around, they'd be affected in the different areas (the same "area" on the screen, different relative to the objects), like there was some sort of shape that was clipping away the fill (and only fill) from them at that point, and only for certain objects... If I flipped the whole thing horizontally (it was symmetrical), there was no glitch. Here, the glitch is that one of the coastal dithering lines (number one or two) is missing from part of the upper continent's southern sea coast. Weird stuff.

[Naeddyr]

Here's some test mountains and hills. Trying to figure out how to simulate extreme height and plateaus and connected height, etc.

[Karro]

Looks good, I like the mountains.

Also... the Hugin used in your little example above, this is the same Hugin that is used to stitch panoramas?

[Naeddyr]

Looks good, I like the mountains.

Also... the Hugin used in your little example above, this is the same Hugin that is used to stitch panoramas?

The very same.

EDIT:

argh i can't get it right

I WILL CREATE THE PERFECT MOUNTAINS IF IT KILLS SOMEONE ELSE THAN ME

just you see!!

[overlordchuck]

AAGHHH!! Look what your ceaseless quest for perfect mountains has done...

Come...closer...*cough*

The mountains...look...fine..I really like...the test ones...bleaaaagghhhh........

[Naeddyr]

The mountains...look...fine..I really like...the test ones...bleaaaagghhhh........

That's because the test one's didn't have any horizontally aligned chains! I'd really like to have a style that is consistent for all chains (older mountains can have the brush method), and I even kept on thinking about this in bed so's a coold nae sleep.