Tag Archives: atlas

Creating Attractive Satellite-style Textures

Posted on April 8, 2017 by

This post is going to be a short overview of a method for creating a plausibly-realistic and visually attractive satellite-view of a habitable planet. First, I run tectonics.js until I find an attractive arrangement of continental features. Or… just, you … Continue reading →

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Repost: Toponymy

Posted on March 29, 2017 by

Some of the best mappers I know will quail in terror when the time comes to add names to their maps.

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MMPS

Posted on May 22, 2014 by

I may have found another way to flatten imagery and maps onto equirectangular projection. Matthew’s Map Projection Software, created by Matthew Arcus, is a suite of command-line applications for creating and re-projecting maps. At least on my Macintosh, it was … Continue reading →

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Working with the Conjugate Plate in GPlates

Posted on February 2, 2014 by

As promised last week, we are now going to demonstrate the usefulness of the conjugate plate in gplates. I’m going to start with just the two lines preparing plate 100. To that I will add another pair of lines defining … Continue reading →

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An Addendum to “Smoking Grass”

Posted on September 10, 2013 by

As suggested by Realmwright, I’ve decided to rework my last map a little bit. He pointed out that the landmasses would all fit nicely on the map if they were just shifted a little so that the continent that got … Continue reading →

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More gplates Goodness

This just in. gplates can actually move pieces of rasters on a globe. So far I haven’t used this in anger. Just a proof of concept with existing data and imagery. For Earth, of course. People seem a little obsessed … Continue reading →

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Continental Drift the gplates Way

Posted on August 23, 2013 by

Okay. So in the last post we discussed the process of creating vector features with gplates. Now, we’re going to touch on the real bread-and-butter of gplates: simulated continental drift. This is just going to be a getting started course … Continue reading →

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Using gplates for Realistic Worldbuilding

Posted on August 22, 2013 by

I was “recently” introduced(re-introduced as I already had an older version) to gplates in a world mapping thread on the sfrpg forum. There’s some good stuff in that thread. Ishmael’s gimmick for baking planet surface texture maps in Blender is … Continue reading →

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More Work With Planet

Posted on February 11, 2013 by

Last week I started working with Torben Mogensen’s planet heightfield generator. This week I’m going to continue on that vein a little longer. First off, we’ll start with a method to create a seamap image for our new world. Let’s start … Continue reading →

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Toponymy

Posted on October 16, 2012 by

Some of the best mappers I know will quail in terror when the time comes to add names to their maps. Sometimes it’s just the problem of clearly labeling the various features of their newly created landscape without making it … Continue reading →

Posted in Mapping, World Building | Tagged , , , , , | 3 Comments