Shifted Earth
Reading this article sparked a desire to play around with some of these ideas in FT3. I was hoping to start by springboarding off the most suitable "ETOPO..." data set. Seemed like a great start for a fantasy or post-apocalyptic alt-Earth world for RP campaigns.
It seems that in late 2013 I was told here, that FT3 didn't have the required capabilities. =[
Is this still the case, and if so, is there another tool that can help?
It seems that in late 2013 I was told here, that FT3 didn't have the required capabilities. =[
Is this still the case, and if so, is there another tool that can help?
Comments
Maybe Joe Slayton can answer your question.
As you mentioned a rotated earth would be great with the north pole lying at the equator.
I found the images on the site very astonishing because they show the actual problem.
It is not only about rotating a cylindrical projection of the earth clockwise or counterclockwise.
You have to transform all coordinates with its belonging longitudes and latitudes separately.
I did it with astronomical formulae for coordinate transformation.
I wrote a little program that converted a rather tiny bitmap of the earth (cylindrical projection) to a rotated earth (also in a cylindrical projection). I hope the name for the projection is right at all...
Joe surely knows if this is a smart way to do or if there are more easy ways to get a new world map of a rotated earth
Here is my result:
As you see Antarctica gets rather sharp - because there is a lot of information spread out in the original upper picture and now it is situated compressed in the middle of the new earth projection.
On the other side there is comparatively few data for South america that are spread out in high southern latitudes on the "new" earth - therefore it gets rather diffuse.
Greetings,
André
Greetings in return; great post! I enjoyed your example and found it encouraging. What is the largest resolution your program can handle?
Peace,
-Raymond
It tog me a little while and I plan to make my little program accessible for public if someone is interested as soon as possible.
With it you can rotate maps with real world data with any angle. I just hold on writing some documentation to it.
In this post I will show you that I managed to turn the real world data of ETOPO2 into a new set of data - when earth's rotation axis is changed by 90 degrees.
The result in FT3 is this:
or with a new climate texture (taken from Terraformer for FT3 v.0.5)
The belonging FT3 file is attached to this posting.
Greetings,
André
Following animation shows the slow rotation of the rotation axis of the earth from 0 to 90 degrees and the belonging euqirectangular projection.
/André
You can download from here:
rotated_earth.pdf
I would be glad if somebody had the time to go through it and gives me feedback.
I hope it is useful for some people of the community.
Thank you,
André
Thanks for the tutorial! I have been trying to figure out a way to show wandering poles with real world data and this looks like it will be perfect.
I am having trouble downloading the FT3_MDR_fileconverter file so I haven't been able to work all the way through the tutorial yet, but I will let you know how it works out for me once I do.
Thanks again
This looks perfect. Work life has kept me away mostly, but I so admire your work that I wanted to comment as soon as I saw this set of updates: Fantastic.
At my earliest opportunity I will attempt to try out the program+tutorial so you have feedback. In the meantime I can at least say that I'm impressed not only that you were able to achieve the feature, but also that you were willing to invest the time and share the tools.
Best Regards,
-Raymond