World Map, for a fantasy world similar to Earth

This is an update to my first fantasy map (shown in my introduction). It was made for a medieval role playing sim in Second Life (SL). The world of that sim is Earth like, but different. Many of the players there had come from other sims where they had developed back stories that were still relevant to ongoing stories. It was necessary to bring everyone’s’ stories onto some common frame.

Here is an image from SL, showing the map and a globe that uses the same map, in use.

There is a significant limitation in SL, that affected the design of the map. SL limits textures (images) that are uploaded to SL to a resolution of 1024 x 1024 pixels. (Images can be uploaded at resolution up to 20148 x 2048 pixels, but they are automatically reduced to 1024 x 1024 pixels.) This means that it is not possible to show a lot of detail, and to be readable in Sl, any labels / lettering must be quite large.

The idea for the look was that it should look like a historical medieval map. I did make the deliberate decision, though to not introduce the large errors that were found on real historical maps.

Process:

The base map was produced in photoshop. The coastline was drawn using photoshop pens from Noah Bradly. The mountains and other geographic features used the photoshop pens of Joel Pigou (https://gumroad.com/joelpigou) I also used ideas learned from several you tube tutorials:

-Spoon Graphics Create a Fantasy Map of Your Own Fictional World in Adobe Photoshop https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=plF8mdhANMM

-Team Bradley How to Easily Make a Map in 10 Minutes with Photoshop. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JGYEqQshfIQ

-Vorsp. Cartography Brush Map Making Tutorial. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fmnBUGuRWnE

– and others.

The continental landmasses were drawn on a rectangle for the entire world. I used an aspect ratio 2:1, based on 360 degrees of longitude and 180 degrees of latitude. However, I ended up fitting the base map to +/- 80 degrees of latitude, so the aspect ratio should have been 360:160 => 9:4.

I then exported the map to QGIS (Open source GIS software) and registered it to the geographic coordinate system, using the corners of the image as control points. I added a geographic grid in QGIS.

For the globe, I exported the map image (now with a grid) back to photoshop. There I added a (featureless) 10 degree strip to top and bottom. They end up as the North and South poles, there is no map detail there. I added place names, and then exported an image to a png file, for upload to SL.

I then applied the uploaded image as a texture to the sphere, to make a globe with my map, in SL. The prexisting SL globe I used was made in SL by Raya Jonson.

For the world map, I used QGIS to re project the base map w/grid to a Mollweide projection. Again, I exported the projected map with grid, and imported it back into photoshop. In photoshop, I added the names, etc., and constructed the frame. I exported the final result as two separate images, one for the East half of the map, and one for the West half. Both images were uploaded to SL, and used to texture two separate prims that make up the map in SL. This gives me an SL resolution of 2048 x 1024 pixels for the final map.

There will be additional maps, consistent with this one although with different styles, that will be used to flesh more of the world as needed, to support the evolving RP stories, in SL.

Attached Thumbnails