projections

Yet another cartography-related post, and this time its about my old nemesis -projections.

Anyone with a decent knowledge of mapmaking knows that a flat world map (usually created in what's known as an equirectangular projection) becomes extremely distorted around the poles once turned into a sphere. so a budding cartographer is faced with two dilemmas- either create an equirectangular map and then distort it into a fitting perspective or do the opposite and draw a map to best-suit the intended projection and then work back and apply a distorted version of it into a world map.

As always I chose the hard route and, with a half-completed map decided to start from scratch with a realistic projection.

Here is the equirectangular map:

I've had this completed for some time now as a psd file, with ocean currents, prevalent winds, climates, graticlues, etc and have made 3d globes on photoshop before, though i've never been able to make a desired projection i've been happy with.

Using this link, i was able to find a great NASA-made programme that creates up to 90-different projections from a base equirectangular world-map (i have to thank the kind people at Cartopgraphersguild.com for the link). using that simple programme (little-to-no cartpgraphical skills required to use it;it's pretty intuitive) I was able to create a handful of maps, including these two: an Azimuthal equal-area projection and an Equidistant conic projection, respectively. 

Inner Sea - Azimuthal Equal Area

Inner Sea - Equidistant Conic 

the projections are very similar though i do prefer the Azimuthal Equal Area, which i think retains the proportions better than the Equidistant Conic (though that might well-be due to the properties i set in the programme).

other than those two i also created an Orthographic sphere, and a Wagner IX projection:

Elyden - Orthographic

Elyden - Wagner IX

links

just thought I'd share this very helpful link: http://www.squidoo.com/fantasyworldbuilding

it's got loads of different choices, for creating creatures, conlanging, mapmaking, worldbuilding etc. lots of cool links that lead to yet more links. oh the linky goodness :)

And on the second day...

... more about maps.

As i said in the earlier post I'm currently slightly obsessed with maps. The first iteration of the map in the first post was a drawing on an A3 piece of card, just simple pencil outlines ouverwritted with a fine ink pen, though by the time I finished it I was already looking to other means of drawing my maps - Gimp, Photoshop, etc. I took a photo of it and used PS to add layers and built on it. this is the original photo, taken about 4-years ago:

It's changed a bit since then, though general outline has remained the same - large dry continent (Sammaea)to the south, the Inner Sea and Dark Seas in the middle, and the more temperate continent (Llachatul) to the north. The map a bit land-intense, so i warped the coastlines, making most seas, gulfs, bays, oceasna ect slightly bigger or with conaved coastlines (if that makes any sense), through no worldbuilding need as such, though to make it more balanced, in a manner of speaking.

Using bevel and emboss, textures and masks on various layers i built up the seas and lands, to get a more realistic map, with contours and a feeling of depth to it:

I was quite pleased with it at the time (i was still relatively inexperienced with PS, though as I kept on looking at it I realised it wasnt in the 'in-world' style i was looking for. Themap i wanted was meant o be something to have come from the world itself. This looked too computer generated, so I went on and made the map that I showed in the first post.

I'll post something about worlbuilding here too soon, I promise :)

And on the first day...

...on the first day, I thought this would be a good idea :). 7 years down the road, and after various writing courses, not an insignificant amount of time and money spent researching worldbuilding, getting an ACE certificate in adobe photoshop due to my masochistic love of cartography, and god knows what else, I'm not really any closer to getting this damnable world of mine done.

A bit alarmist, probably. I have an encyclopaedia detailing various facets of my world clocking in at over 500 double-sided A4 pages, most of which is bullet points detailing histories, myths, locations, ruins, nations, people, flora, fauna etc. I've gone from being someone with no-experience of PS5 to being pretty adept at it (if i do say so myself... which I do), though I haven't ventured too far from things like maps, timelines and star-charts with it to be honest with you. What started as simple poetry, short stories and the accounts of imagined explorers, itinerants, travellers and merchants (a.la Marco Polo or Ibn Batuta) slowly changed into a series of larger, sprawling epics that never got very far from the planning stage as my thirst for knowledge and yearning to populate this world with coherent histories, timelines, lineages, hierarchies etc got the better of me and I moved instead into the Worldbuilding aspects, concentrating on details like determining the rainshadows of my continents to the chronicling the dynasties of long-dead nations whose ruins have been meticulously named and placed in my beloved maps.

This is my new obsession. The short stories and plotting of the overarching storyline have been sidelined (yet not forgotten), in favour of the detailing of this world that grows more alive with every word i write (at least i hope so). This blog is a means of keeping track of my thoughts in a more coherent manner than my usual scatterbrained attempts. Also there is the hope that fellow worldbuilders stumbling upon my efforts might find something that's to their liking or find something to comment on or provide help with.

Anyway, to start things off, here's an old version of a map that I created for the world of Elyden, which, once the new version (5.0, at my last count) is done (no time soon, I'm afraid) I plan on priniting out at high-res at about 4' x 6" and will grace my geek den at home. Ah, I look forward to the day when I can sit back witha  glass of icy cider and look at that map hanging on my wall...

Since making this map I've made a few changes, including changing the rhumb lines to proper latitudes/longitudes (makes more sense on a map of this scale), added some detailing to the coasts and resized it so that the focus of the Map are the Inner, Dark and Iapetan Seas (basically cropping out everything east of the Argent Mountains and south of the Roiling Sea). The change in scale has allowed me a bit more freedom with font sizes and allowed me to add some more areas and locations to regions that would have been conspicuously without notable features due to the large-fonted nation-text filling up the entire territory! The map borders themselves have also changed considerably with the new (as yet unseen) version having a more classical carographical feel with alternation white/black wide striped border with lat/long details on them.

On the whole I'm still happy with this map and it can be seen as an older version (in-world) of the one I'm working on now (though that doesnt really make sense as an older version, in-world would have had different borders...) but anyway, not to take anything from this, I do feel a bit of pride when I look at this (particularly the folded paper/mouldy effect); though hope to be able to better it. I've come to realise that its not only the worldbuilding aspect of this world that i enjoy but also some more artistic things, like the maps so when I get bored writing histories I can always try my hand at something else, like this:

Well I think that's enough for now. Not much insight into the world I've created, though don't let that fool you. There's mythologies, histories and timelines aplenty, and various civilisations old and new that im currently detailing.

If anyone comes across this and finds it interesting, or if you ahve any comments or suggestions, please let me know,

thanks