Friday, January 17, 2014

Custom World Maps to Globes?

I love old maps and old globes.

But what I would really love is a globe of my game world.

All I have is this map:





I didn't even make that. That comes solely from the skills of +Rich Trickey and +James Mishler.
Nor really do I have the skills to do it myself.

But I have always wanted a globe of my game world. Something I could use, but mostly put on display in my game room.

Anyone know of anyone that has done something like this?  Anyone know of place where I could get one made?

8 comments:

Reese Laundry said...

I don't have any idea, I'm afraid, but I just wanted to chime in and say that it's a damn cool idea.

Timothy S. Brannan said...

Here is one sent to me so far.
http://www.1worldglobes.com/customacrylicdisplayglobes.htm

Brett Slocum said...

Is that a representation of Pangaea? Neat?

faoladh said...

I seem to recall that one of the artifacts from the estate of the late Prof. MAR Barker was a globe he had made depicting Tekumel.

Joe said...

You'd need to get it redone in the right projection or else the areas closer to the poles would look skewed.

If you did it on a icosahedral projection you'd be closer, but you probably need it sort of rounded edges instead of a straight d20 project.

Then get a foam ball, print it to the right size (measure or just print it once, then adjust and print again.)

That's the home version. A place like the one linked would do better. But I'm fairly sure they would need the map redone in another projection.

Here's an d20 icosahedral map I did a while back:
http://inkwellideas.com/2010/04/hex-map-glossary-scale-part-ii/

phf said...

It's the flat map that is skewed. The globe would be what the world actually looked like, that nice map is the distorted view of the world.

Anonymous said...

Brett, that looks like the Known World/Mystara from BECMI.

Thorf said...

Based on my work with Mystara's maps, that map is in the Equirectangular Projection, so it's perfect for putting on a globe. The problem is that there isn't enough of it east-west to cover the globe.

Tim, I'm not sure if you're familiar with this topic, but to cut a very long story short, Mystara's Outer World only takes up about five eighths of the Outer World. With Oerth added in, maybe that's now three quarters. (The Hollow World Set map tried to solve this by stretching things over the whole world, but that means all the hex maps also need stretched east-west.)

Once you have a 2:1 ratio image including your world map, it's not that hard to do. You can make a paper one using NASA's free G.Projector program to reproject the map into an interrupted projection, then cut and paste to make up your 3D globe.