Tag Archives: atlas

Using Blender to Bake Icosahedral Maps

Posted on April 9, 2018 by Astrographer

Getting back to my usual maps and planetary textures, today I am responding to the comment by Gregrox, here. I did previously make some recommendations for converting equirectangular maps to the icosahedral projection, but Photoshop and Flexify are far from … Continue reading →

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Using GIS Tools and Data

Posted on October 23, 2017 by Astrographer

There is now a second part here… Recently(…-ish) I found something on the Zompist forum that I found interesting. Gareth3 was using an existing real world data(in this case, Stewart Island off of the southern tip of New Zealand) scaled … Continue reading →

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Creating Attractive Satellite-style Textures

Posted on April 8, 2017 by Astrographer

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 Astrographer

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 Astrographer

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 Astrographer

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 Astrographer

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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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 →

Posted on August 24, 2013 by Astrographer | Leave a comment

Continental Drift the gplates Way

Posted on August 23, 2013 by Astrographer

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 Astrographer

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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