How do I crate a huge map to use for After Effects

[Gots]

Hey boys and girls, girls and boys!

I am an experienced animator and pretty good with map making, currently using AI or Wonderdraft. I have a question, I want to make a map for Youtube, ideally of whole Europe with some custom assets, the thing is I want the map to be HUGE, whole Europe so I can zoom in and out to show politics and animations.

How do I create such a huge map?

I thought of exporting tiles from https://maps-for-free.com/ somehow, dunno how to automatize this, would love help with that if anyone could offer a way to export the tiles


And finally start edit them to add my custom assets such as cities etc.

Thx in advance!

[waldronate]

When you say HUGE, what level of detail are you looking for? 1m, 10m, 100m, 1km, or something else per pixel?

When you say "Europe", what is your bounding box on the globe? Traditionally, the mainland of Europe runs from Spain in the South and West through Norway in the north and to the Ural Mountains in the East. It's a bit bigger if you include Iceland, Svalbard, and Crete, of course. That's a fair chunk of map to cover.

What is your desired map projection? That's an important question that relates to image size, especially in the northern reaches. Many existing maps are in some variant of Mercator or Equirectangular, which may or may not be suitable for what you want to show.

What software do you plan to use to work on your map? There are many maps out there that would let you annotate their base tiles and keep the underlying pand-and-zoom characteristics of the map, but it sounds like you have something else in mind. I ask because if your tools support a maximum image size of 8162 pixels, then you may need more than one map to get the level of detail that you're interested in.

How do you plan to present the map on YouTube? Screen capture from a browser?

https://www.naturalearthdata.com/ may or may not be useful to you, depending on your requirements for detail.

Any more information that you're willing to provide can help with the quality of advice that you receive.

[Tiana]

Maps for free is using Open Street Map. With QGis you can pull OSM tiles using the QuickOSM plugin. You'll have to install the program then download the QuickOSM plugin. https://plugins.qgis.org/plugins/QuickOSM/ And install that. From there you can pull out any information from the OSM database using Overpass queries. This is probably what you'll be best able to use as a base for your map that has the huge scale and flexibility you have in mind. If you don't know how to work with it I can be commissioned to help. But it sounds like you're interested in tackling this project yourself!

[johnvanvliet]

i work on some very large maps some of them are 131,072 x 65,536 pixels ( and some bigger ) and can take up 10+ Gig of drive space

you will NEED a lot of system RAM to work with very large maps.