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Sphere to icosahedron / hex for planets

M

Merxiless

SOC-13
Greetings, fellow Travellers.

I'm trying to wrap circular / half sphere / flattened maps generated using lunarcell to an icosahedron, perhaps with a hex map a la a traveller planet to that.

Any clues as to how to go about this?

All of the net sites I've found discuss how it was laboriously done as a projection for world maps in 1851, and various spinoffs from that, but no software tools to do so.

I'll hand draw it if I have to, but I'm looking for something a bit more visually appealing.

Thanks for any hints, tips, or links to things you've all found.
 
I'm all but certain I've seen someone post a picture of just such as part of a project here on CotI. If you haven't tried a search and looking through the gallery that might be worth doing while you wait for whoever it was to pop up :)

As I recall it was a bit rough and they were still working on it but it might be a start.

Ah, I think this is the one I was thinking of:

http://www.travellerrpg.com/CotI/Gallery/index.php?n=230

Might not be quite what you're after.
 
Last edited:
Icosahedron said:
D'oh. Just for a second I thought I was being paged by a guy called Sphere.

Sorry, can't help with the query. ;)
Click to expand...

If I were you I'd make myself scarce 'round these here parts. It sounds like to me that he wants to find you to wrap a world map around you or your head. :eek: If he does I'd report him to the mods for making a personal attack.
;)
 
Merxiless said:
Greetings, fellow Travellers.

I'm trying to wrap circular / half sphere / flattened maps generated using lunarcell to an icosahedron, perhaps with a hex map a la a traveller planet to that.
Click to expand...

Back in the late 1990s, there was a program on the net called 'Wilbur', which would do exactly that. It was wickedly unstable, one could generate a rectangular orthographic map, do some math operations to generate sea level and continental shelves and such before it crashed. One of its neat features is it makes Traveller-style ico maps from ortho maps.

The author later licensed some of the code for ProFantasy's Fractal Terrains
 
Thanks to all for your responses.

I want to do the reverse of that sphere, actually.

Seems like I'll just have to use the JimV tools, and then photoshop it.
 
What you seem to be looking for is pretty easy actually. Since you mention LunarCell, I surmise two things: you know about flamingpear.com and you have equirectangular maps for your planets. Cool. Now get back onto flamingpear.com, download a little gem of a filter called Flexify(actually Flexify2).

Now fire up Photoshop with your new filter in place. Load your LunarCell map(or any other global map you wish to work with) To start with, leave all of the rotations at zero, set the input projection to equirectangular(for LunarCell... this also works for planetGenesis output, other maps may vary, but Flexify has a pretty good collection of input projections). For what you are looking for, the output projection should be something called icomap. What results won't have a hexgrid(someone else will have to help you with that, I quit using grids on my maps ages ago), and it won't be in exactly the same arrangement as Traveller standard, but it's pretty darn good.

If you find the results satisfactory, buy the thing, it's like $25.00. Even a semi-employed geography student/toilet-mucker like myself can afford that. If not satisfied, don't pay anything and it'll quit working in about a month.

Wilbur is a pretty hot tool for terrain creation and editing, but it's reprojection tools are not all that good. It's a lot more stable than it used to be and more than worth the price(free). Really... get it.

While you're at it look into planetGenesis at planetgenesis.souceforge.org. it has no terrain editing capabilities, but it is an excellent tool for noise-based global terrain generation. Try the perlin simplex noise. It's faster than conventional perlin, generates fewer unsightly artifacts, and I did the coding. This is kind of a personal pride thing.
 
Here is my original image.
flat.jpg


Here is the Flexified version.
icob.jpg
 
Given the expense of Flexify(although I already own it, yay!), I decided to test Texture>Other Maps>Icosahedral Projection... in Wilbur. Here are the results.

icowilbur.png


BTW, su_liam and Sadwillow map to the same entity. For some reason, on Windows my account defaults to this and on MacOS it defaults to the other. Unfortunately, I don't remember my Sadwillow p/w(apparently), so here I am. This wasn't an intentional sock puppet...
 
su_liam said:
Given the expense of Flexify(although I already own it, yay!), I decided to test Texture>Other Maps>Icosahedral Projection... in Wilbur. Here are the results. BTW, su_liam and Sadwillow map to the same entity. For some reason, on Windows my account defaults to this and on MacOS it defaults to the other. Unfortunately, I don't remember my Sadwillow p/w(apparently), so here I am. This wasn't an intentional sock puppet...
Click to expand...

Thread Necro...

How did you get Wilber to do it in color? It keeps making everything in shades of green.

Tad
 
What a coincidence, there was someone on the cartographer's guild who was asking for a hex overlay for Iso planet maps produced by Fractal Terrains to use in traveller. I made one for him which works for Fractal Terrains Iso maps, it should work for Wilbur as well if you flip it horizontally.

You can download it here: http://www.mediafire.com/?gxrbepebdakbr

trav.jpg
 
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Thanks Ravells, I'm sure I can make use of that on my FT maps. :)
It's been a while since I made any, but these things go in cycles.
 
I recently figured out a fairly easy way to do the reverse transformation, that is to convert an icosahedral map to a flat equirectangular map using Wings3D and Pov-Ray, two free programs available to Mac, Windows and apparently many Linices.

Here is a link to my tutorial on wordpress. Hopefully this is useful.

Granpafishy said:
Thread Necro...

How did you get Wilber to do it in color? It keeps making everything in shades of green.

Tad
Click to expand...

Bigger necro.

If I understand what you're saying, Wilbur is basically showing the altitude texture.

If you haven't figured it out on your own, already, here's how to show your favorite pre-generated world in all its textured glory.

On the menubar select Texture>>Shader Setup...
Click the Blending tab.
Set the Altitude box to 0.
Set the Texture box to 1, and click the Select Texture Image button.
Find the graphic file with your desired texture. Click OK till you're looking at the map.

Now that you have your nice rectangular map displayed, select Texture>>Other Maps>>Icosahedral Projection from the menubar.

Now you should have a lovely icomap.

I apologize for all the necromancy, but I'd been looking for a way to do the ico->equi transform for some time...
 
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