@@ijahnnakehlam5919this I'm not personally interested in much of the sea floor topography since not much happens under the sea. But a short example would be good I think
I would say definitely yay. There aren't a lot of resources that talk about how to work out ocean topography. Which is really a shame if you want to create a submarine culture.
11:23 There totally is a fix for that. It's in the UV Editing Tab. You can select and move the points on that overlaying grid manually, but there there is some other way that i just don't remember. I would bet my life on that, because this app has an option for everything.
Have you tried to add thickness to the features? Would be nice to be able to stack them on top of each other at the rifting zones so they form canyons after separating. Not sure if the 3d scalar fields in GPlates, qgis, or blender would be best for this. Thank you.
You can do a lot with Blender. One quick thing is turn your altitudes into greyscale (white being highest, black lowest. Import that as an image texture, change your shader into something that accepts a bump map, add a sun light source and suddenly you’ll have higher terrain casting shadows. Spend some time with some basic shading/lighting tutorials and you’ll quickly be able to see your planet from space!
Also, satellite mapping. If instead of a colour they use a texture they can make the map from space and, with a few tweaks like other textures (hydrography, bathimetry, etc...) they can make the planet from space
and painting a smooth heightmap would be easier to do all in blender, with a steppy colorramp (maybe the mode is called constant in blender, idr) to create something that could be automatically vectorized easily, optionally first upscaling it and downscaling afterwards to make that higher quality
could also create a realistic terrain shader (optionally using multiple smaller images at different scales and angles for filling in the smaller details) with a water shader based on depth, use temp/moisture to change the shader to be different biomes, etc to see it as if it were real
or set up images to use to blend between stuff, and then paint where stuff is. could be a bunch of work but could also do a separate mountain and dirt layer with different heights, where whichever is taller is shown, so that he boundary of exposed rock on a mountain could be moved by changing the heights
I am feeling so, SO vindicated right now. Ever since I said in the atlas map video that I use blender to draw on a sphere and you commented that "I would not recommend it" and here we are 🤣😜
Right? I've also used geometry nodes to transform a plane map into a sphere in Blender so I can hotswap between both shapes in the same program. Blender is crazy-powerful and should never be underestimated.
One of the great parts of being a programmer is that when you get an idea for a software, you can actually try to make it. I'm gonna try my hand at making a 3D cartography program like how you've described.
My suggestion is to make it a Blender Add-On using Python. Pretty much all of the widgets you need are already there, they just need a little extra love to make them all gel as a cartography tool. Plus, you can animate your stuff and use the physics engine to collide stuff. :)
I think it'd be great to have a GUI setup like Autocad where you have a 3D sphere model to (vector) draw directly on and then you can create paper-space "drawings" with viewports using your preferred projection, centering, and zoom level. Of course just like Autocad you should be able to draw on those projections and alter the master model. That way you could have your whole globe map to as much detail as you decide to do and create a detailed map of whatever part of it you need in the most convenient projection.
If you press 5 on your numpad, it will switch your view to orthographic instead of perspective. Also makes it so you can't accidentally zoom inside your mesh.
This has “Julia learns Blender for a Drawfee speed draw” vibes lol. It’s quite interesting tho, and I’ve enjoyed the video. Also learned that Blender is free. I do most of my work on my iPad (so Procreate and Vectornator mostly), but I wonder if I could do something similar in Nomad…
Procreate has a built in feature for drawing on 3d models, you can export the UV map of the drawing*. Which basically means draw on a sphere then export the mercator projection. *I'm not 100% sure of that, but you can at least see the UV map.
It is possible to draw with vectors/splines using Blender's Grease pencil feature. You can set the stroke placement to surface, so it snaps on the surface of the sphere. After that you can bake these vector drawings onto the blank image texture of the sphere. If you want me to go more in depth on how to do so please let me know. (Though I must add that the way you are doing it is much easier and probably faster)
I'm very much interested in the sea floor topography. Being able to know where magnetic features, assuming the fictional world's magnetic poles flip like the Earth's do, isolated deep sea ecologies, and mineral deposits would exist, is all very useful. Please don't skip over the stuff going on in and under the seas.
Blender does have a way to work with vector graphics, its grease pencil system is vector drawing/animation tool kind of like adobe animate, but its strokes can be projected into 3d space. However I don't know how you could render it to an image to import into illustrator.
If you noclip inside the globe in the wrong places, you end up in Biblaridion's Refugium. "Maybe just be, but I think Picard is looking pretty tasty." -Edgar 2023
The reason the uv sphere is used instead of the icosphere is because it's texture is equirectangular already. The icosphere does not use an equirectangular texture map, so you'd need to do a lot more work to get it to work. If you weren't using an existing texture in equirectangular projection, then I completely agree tho
@@WeatherWonders For the icosphere, blender by default uses a Dymaxion projection which is essentially the net of an icosahedron. Another one that I might use is the orthographic projection (although it has a lot of distortion at the equator so maybe not ideal). For the round cube, the best net is is the "spherical cube" projection which is just the net of a cube
The issue you have at 11:10 can not be fixed, mathematically speaking, but you can mitigate it by using more geometry. When you create the sphere (at 2:34), increase the amount of rings (and segments, you might get weird results if your subdivisions are not square). 1280x640 was something my laptop did not like, but I did make him accept 512x256. There are probably also methods to have a lot of geometry at the poles and little at the equator, but I'd have to think about how to do that. Come to think of it, there might be a way to do the mathematically correct projection with nodes, but I'd have to think about that a bit more.
there is no way to correct the projection, unless you just mean fixing the gaps, which is actually doable. pixels at the poles will be stretched no matter what you do, since it is a product of the equirectangular projection of a sphere. If you wanted no distortion, you could use 1 map for the equator and another for the poles (polar projected), and blend between them.
It's not fixable with a UV sphere but a NURBS sphere, on the other hand, is mathematically correct instead of being a polygonal approximation of a sphere, and therefore doesn't have the problem of triangles at its poles like a UV sphere does. I'm uncertain if you can paint on the NURBS sphere in Blender but maybe you can; the node graph might need a few tweaks.
@@nahoj.2569 Correct. I was referring only to the issue of the polar triangle gaps. Projection distortion itself is an inherent feature of turning a 3D sphere into a 2D plane. There is no projection that is free from distortion, it's part of the math.
FYI: Increasing your Segments and Rings will reduce the size of the gapped triangles, by the way - has to do with the geometry of a UV sphere - the first set of polygons around the polar vertex are triangles and that's how Blender does the mapping.
QGIS is your perfect program for drawing on a sphere. But the learning curve for that is a whole mood and I can't endorse using it just for drawing these things.
it's great, but it is hard as heck. I want to see if i can model soils and climate with that. Plus, i’m trying to go into GIS professionally, so i have zero reason not to learn it.
I agree - with both statements. I spent some time converting a map to QGIS. Later realized I'd need to really refine my contours to get any thing decent looking in 3D, but it sure had me captivated for months. I tested a small island, and loved the scale change feature, and the ability to fly over it in 3D. BIG learning curve, but Edgar seems alright with those!
@@tripledeluxeguy I disagree. QGIS allows you to select different projections for working on different parts. Would I like an Illo program that can work on a sphere, baring that, QGIS gets it done.
To not get stuck in the sphere as often you can set the near clip plane. Press N to open view port properties, click View tab on side, reduce the number in Clip Start. It will also let you zoom closer to the sphere making the 1m radius sphere less annoying to work with. The triangles at the top and bottom are due to UV unwrapping (how the image is projected to the sphere), there should be videos on how to unwrap spheres to use the entire image. As for consistent brush size, I believe it's not possible for texture painting. In sculpt mode there's a Radius Unit option that you can set to Scene instead of View, but I don't think there's one for texture painting.
hey Artifixean. if you are worried about the large flat plains you can add some gradient height. in real life when large mountain ranges erode all that crustal material has to go somewhere. Usually, aside from ending up in the ocean, it means a general rise of the surrounding low lands through deposition. an extreme modern example is the Tibetan plateau which is really just an accumulation of sediment from the surrounding mountains. while not always holding true especially in wetter environments its an easy way to add broad texture to flat lands.
Technically Blender has something with grease pencils akin to a vector graphics program. You could try using those to draw on a sphere and then rendering it to an equirectangular image using a camera in panorama mode at the centre of the scene. Though I don't know if that's worth the hassle.
I know exactly your problem and the exact solution you want! The unwrapped UV sphere is always going to have those triangles. The U axis is around the sphere and the V axis is perpendicular to that. All the quadrangles have to share a vertex at the poles, so they become triangles. There are two ways to get around this. You can replace them with an n-gon, so there would be a single flat face on the ends of your sphere. The better way for a globe is to warp a plane into a sphere. This is how that's done in a beginner-friendly way: 1: Delete the cube and add a plane to the scene. 2: Press 'Tab' to go into edit mode. 3: Press 'S' 'X' '2' 'Enter' to scale it on the X axis 200%. 4: Press 'Control+R' to create a loop cut. Move the mouse to make the pink line go the short way across your rectangle and primary click to confirm it. 5: Press 'A' to select all. 6: Press 'W' and select 'Subdivide' from the menu. Increase the iterations in the dialogue box or repeat until you have a good amount of faces. 7: 'Tab' back to object mode, and press 'G' 'Z' '1' 'Enter' to move your plane one Blender unit up. 8: 'Tab' back into edit mode and 'A' to select all. 9: Make sure you are looking at the front view by pressing 'NumPad 1' 10: Press 'Space' and type 'Warp'. Click on 'Mesh>Transform>Warp' In the dialogue box change the warp angle to 180 degrees. 11: Press 'R' 'Z' '90' 'Enter' so you're now looking at the side of half a cylinder. 12: Press 'Space' and reselect 'Warp'. In the dialogue change the angle to 360 degrees. 13: 'Tab' back to object mode. Lo! Yonder sphere is made from a flat plane! You can either add the map texture before or after but it might be simplest to do that between steps 7 and 8 if you have problems. Enjoy your map painting!
Blender still deals with triangles for performance (as does probably all the other 3D software), so this doesn't prevent gaps; one of two triangles in each quad has no area in 3D space and will be missed in texture painting. Either way, I think editing a sphere would be a faster and more reliable way to get the triangle-shaped quads: delete pole vertex, extrude adjacent loop, scale to 0 at pole's location.
@@WeatherWonders Sure you could do it that way, but you do have to move the mesh or set the cursor to exactly the pole position on each side and since we're looking at equirectangular maps it's already perfectly unwrapped from the flat plane. There are usually many ways to do everything in Blender! I like this method for globes because I like the precision and not having to worry about aligning the texture exactly, which is what Artifexian was having trouble with, so I thought I'd share it. Whatever works! :)
I feel like you're thinking a bit too vector-based for the way Blender's texture painting is designed. Personally, I'd freehand paint terrain heights with a soft brush (white on black) and export that. You can then "posterize" it into distinct elevations with a filter in Photoshop or similar, and then have Illustrator auto-vectorize that output. Depending on how detailed your painted height map is, that will give you a more or less detailed topography. You can even add some light noise or blur over it in PS before posterizing, in order to control the detail and "jaggedness" of your result. Bonus: You can then use that painted height map in Blender for lighting purposes. A topographical map isn't quite as good of a basis for that because you lose all the detail between the distinct elevation layers. That detail is preserved in the un-posterized raster graphic. I use something similar in my 2D maps to add a shadow to the elevations, just faked with the "bevel & emboss" layer effect instead. Can get decently close to a satellite-image-like look with it, even without actual sphere shading.
Definitely an episode of ocean topography with lots of time lapse maybe? Personally, I enjoy watching the map build up (or down in the case of oceans) with a mug of tea. On a different note, would the high mountain regions of Picard interrupt the polar night jet?
great video!! i was wondering if you will ever use a 3D program for this series. quick note: the distortion you had at 9:54 and 23:34 can be solved if you create a flat plane instead of a uvsphere and then wrap it around itself making it a sphere this will show the entire edge of your texture map instead of it cutting triangles at the top and bottom. also. if you are using a tablet navigating with the middle mouse button is annoying and using the widgets on the sides is even more frustrating you should enable the "emulate 3 button mouse" feature in the edit > preferences > input > mouse, to navigate with the stylus (holding alt and dragging for looking around, alt + ctrl and dragging up and down for zooming in and out, alt + shift for moving around). i know my explanation is terrible even for a person who understands blender so ill make a short UA-cam vid explaining it today
Love watching the world develop! Quick gplates/geography question: What happens to the ocean crust after the supercontinent reforms and then breaks apart again? Do subduction zones tend to open up near the continental crust like the first go around, or do they open deeper in the ocean? Thanks!
@@ColinPaddock I’ve been rewatching some of the tutorials + the world reveal, and I think the answer is subduction zones open near the continental crust (just like in the first supercontinent), then any ocean crust and mid ocean ridges get sucked up, creating Laramide style mountains
I say YAY for seafloor topography, but I'm really enjoying all of this, so more is always better for me. :) Someday I will have the time and energy to do my own world.
It's not quite the same as this process, but I really recommend a tool that NASA's built called 'G.Projector' which is really easy to use for exporting these maps and runs on all OS's. It allows you to import a map projection and export it it in a different projection. I've fed topographic data into it using Mercator projections and converted it to others for art projects. It's also quite customizable with a large number of parameters allowing you to customize global and regional views and lists 200 different output projections.
I'm a huge fan of topography in general. I'd love to see how you address the sea floor in your world given its well documented history. Always look forward to these videos!
I think sea floor topography is basically the same as above sea kevel, with a few cavets, for example subduction zone trenches and the slightly raised areas on either side of spreading rifts. Not super necessary, but maybe for completeness?
On the topic of seafloor topography, I think that it would be a good topic for a video, but obviously I don't think you need to go too in-depth considering you aren't planning on an ocean civilization. However, some of the basics like continental shelfs, mid-ocean ridges, and ocean trenches would be good topics to cover. Also, one thing I've noticed is that this world has a lot less continental crust than Earth. Earth is covered by 40% continental crust while only having 30% land, which means that nearly a quarter of the continents are covered with water, just thought I would point that out. I appreciate all the effort you've put into this series!
If you plan on doing this particular stage of map making a lot, might be worth looking into substance painter. I've spent the last 3 years learning how to use blender for creating 3d models. It is a *fantastic* program and I absolutely love it. It's well laid out and very logical, and has a lot of capability to do so many different things. But the one thing everybody says it's not that great at is painting textures from the 3d view. I haven't tried it out myself yet, but I hear that substance painter is so much better. A lot of 3d artists workflows involve doing everything in blender until you get to the painting step, and exporting everything into substance painter. The downside is that substance painter is not free.
I can see this being REALLY useful for getting around distortion effects when you're doing Atlas-style maps of specific regions, especially once you get into higher latitudes.
One thing I do notice when I use blender is that I don’t have the Texture Shots or Snaps thing, is there anyway to have that so I can change the layer to my sketch layer?
I've used Blender in a more elaborate way to map my planets following Artifexian's older videos (with a written reference I made to make it easier to keep everything in my head). You can paint on a grayscale heightmap while viewing a nice visualization made with material nodes: color gradients for land and ocean (preferably matched to a real map) taking into account a water level map, topography lines, and overlays for maps with other types of information like tectonics. I'm not very happy with the distortion at the poles and might use a cube map or something fancier in the future. I've considered making a tutorial for this, but it seems like it would only be practical if it assumes you already know how to use a few areas of Blender. For clean labels Blender wouldn't work well. If I want to go further than Inkscape with labels I'll probably end up trying to use some real-world mapping software (like for OpenStreetMap).
The breaks in the line are likely cause by linear interpolation between the pixels at the wedges on the poles and the adjacent pixels outside the UV of the sphere. For 3D purposes, I'd recommend using a cube map instead, but that doesn't work for this project. Ironically, in Blender, sometimes planets ARE cubes.
For anyone who with an ipad. Procreate has a built in feature for drawing on 3d models, and you can export the UV map of the drawing*. Which basically means draw on a sphere then export the mercator projection. *I'm not 100% sure of that, but you can at least see the UV map.
It's a choice. There is no way to draw on a texture without distortions. The basic problem of cartography: there is no way to project a sphere onto a plane without some distortions. All you can do it chose how strong these distortions are, and where they occur, and chose your projection (UV map) accordingly. There IS a way to draw on a sphere in Blender without any distortions. By using a high density mesh and vertex painting. But you need a really powerful machine to do that at a decent resolution. It can be a possible way, if you have that kind of computation power, or if you are satisfied with a lower resolution base map that you can improve in other, 2D programs. And there is the method of using vector painting in Blender. Like in 2D, this gets rid of all the distortion and resolution problems... but it has practical issues. There is no simple way to stack polygons over each other. That means either getting really involved (yes, it can be done. But it's lot of work), or keeping it to lines only and doing the conversion into polygons in 2D software again. There may even be other methods that I didn't think of. But I don't think there will be any without some disadvantage.
- in order to prevent going through your sphere, press Num-5 to switch to orthographic view - in order to recenter your view onto the sphere, press Num-. or Num-, (depends on your localization, so whichever is on your Numpad is gonna be right) - the triangles happen because of the finite resolution of your sphere. The higher you go with that initial resolution, the smaller the triangles will be. You are working with a faceted approximation of the sphere, not a perfect sphere. The reason they have to be triangles like that is basically the same reason why this type of map projection blows up the poles (single points) infinitely (into a line that definitely is not a point) - You are basically looking at a finite-resolution approximation of that. Anything outside those triangles will not even be seen by the sphere, so you technically don't need to draw those in, though I suppose for map-aesthetics you might want to anyways. Basically, at the poles is going to be where this is the least accurate. - you can also try using an icosphere instead, which will have a different style, where the poles will only ever have exactly five triangles. Should make very little difference in the end result - you can *also* try what's called a cube sphere: subdivide a cube a lot, then project it onto a sphere which style of sphere you use doesn't really matter much I suppose. Perhaps one plays better with the projection than another. Also, there technically *is* a way to vector-draw in 3D in blender. However it probably doesn't quite do what you want it to do yet. You'd get the outlines, but the fill might be off (it won't know to "stick the fill to the sphere" , basically). Still worth a try perhaps: With Blender's Grease Pencil, you can draw in Project To Surface mode. The main issue with that is that I'm not sure how you'd then get it out of Blender. I think you *can* export SVGs, but it's not gonna flatten your lines into a map to make that actually doable. There *might* be ways to do it with Geometry Nodes though. This would require a bunch more setup, but you'd only have to build that once and could then just use the already done setup over and over.
if you press 5 on the numpad, it will put you into Orothographic View, which will allow you to zoom in farther without actually entering your geometry. You can also use the Camera widget in the top right corner to get into Ortho View as well. You can work around the pixel size by simply using a larger image size. I regularly use 4 and 8k image sizes to work on tiny details.
1. use G.Projector to re reproject ur polar map 2. draw polar map, like normal map 3. use G.Projector to reporogect it back 4. porift? ps. in photoshop u have 3d model. And u can draw on a sphere
I think, you could make your own sphere without the triangle problem out of a single vertex with the help of the screw-modifier. Just put the vertex where one of the poles of your sphere would be in edit-mode. Then leave edid-mode, apply a screw-modifier around the x- or y-axis for a half circle, and then a second one around the z-axis for a full circle.
Very interesting! A couple of things I would like to note: Funnily enough, the first thing you say "Planets are not cubes" might actually be best reversed to fix one of your problems. You saw those weird triangles messing you up? Well if you start with a cube and turn it into a sphere essentially by smoothing it out you don't get those. Also you can use blender to generate noise on a sphere, this can be helpful in making little bumps or randomly placed forests. What is cool as well is that random noise can be weighted by a map you've drawn in. That way you don't get forests spawning in the middle of the ocean for example. I would also be interested to see what can be done with simulation nodes. One idea is simulating weather on your planet, though I would venture a guess the world building community already has a tool for that...
i've been wanting to do this but wasn't sure how, cool video! also, woah, thanks for the texture painting eraser tip, i didn't know that and i've been blendering for a fair bit now... i think i need to brush up on texture painting a lil more, ha. normally i just paint over mishaps with the background colour or ctrl+z it, lol
Hi Edgar, thanks for the awesome content as usual, it's always a pleasure to find out more is available! That said, a question if I may. I've been drawing my own map for a bit, for the most part following your previous shorter tutorial ATLAS MAP series, and one thing that always left me with an itch, and it's most likely something on my part, is that I never know how zoomed in I have to be drawing to make things accurate enough. As in, for example, in this video you're anywhere between 120% to 1300% zoomed in, but maintain the level of detail uniform over the whole of the map? Personally I've struggled a bit because, especially at the beginning, I'd work at a certain level but then either increase or decrease and found myself that once I'd go back to 0% some parts looked a lot more detailed than others. Is it just something we have to deal with or?
Replied before finishing the video, so I'll add something here. Yes please, I'd like to see the ocean floors topography if it's not too much of a bother and, quite frankly, I'd take a short piece on the craton blending as well if it was for me, but I fully understand it might not be the most attention catching thing.
I suggest doing things more iteratively and using real-world references. Draw low-detail shapes, then zoom in and add detail. A consistent grid overlay (on the reference as well possibly) may help as well.
To stop from popping inside your sphere, change the clip as Blender default is far too large for most models. Also, in preferences, change 'orbit around selections' and use the numpad dot key to focus on any object you are working on.
I remember there was a trick to delete the pole point of the sphere mesh, extrude the last ring and move it to where the pole point was. This basically creates rectangles where the poleside line is infinitely short so in 3d it looks the same. But on the texture editor you don't have these triangles anymore but instead squares. Now we are just missing a blender plugin that allows to project and edit svg files as texture images!
I think a cool application that would fit well here would be substance painter, it allows you to draw on 3d objects with photoshop / illustrator like layering systems and what have you. It does come with a pricetag however so not everyone's cup of tea I understand, (currently $215 NZD for a perma license on steam). It's primarily for texturing and baking purposes (so you'd still need to make your own models and uv's externally) but could be used for this kind of work if you would like. I have used it before for making planets and is quite painfree if you know your way around photoshop you could probably find your way around the basics in substance. (Also tons of tutorials). (It also loves things like heightmap calculations for textures, so you could model out your mountains in blender then bake that data onto a spherical surface for clean height details).
I've never even used Blender, but the thought occurred that you might be able to use several "layers" like in step ~3ish, for each of your relief elevations.
My map was twice as wide as it was high but still didn't wrap correctly. The continent i put on the north pole looks like the lines on a lie detector test. What might i have done wrong
As a follower of Artifexian and someone who uses Blender for astronomy renders, I'm pretty confident I moaned loudly with this vid 10:54 that's because, when you created the icosphere, you set the rings to be 64. If you put more, the effect of the triangular faces close to the pole would get minimized but it is way more effort on the CPU and GPU Fun fact: you could theoretically use blender for both satellite painting (you can use a whole texture instead of a colour to create a sorta satellite image map of the planet itself) and for renders of the planets themselves. If you want more info, I'd be happy to provide
I use blender for map making because A: Blender is Free, B: I have been using blender for over 5 years, C: You can basically make most of your projects in Blender.
This looks cool, but wouldn't it be easier to just import it back into gplates and then change the perspective so we can draw it correctly and then put it back to the perspective we wanted
Seafloor wise, i think it would be good to just do a "highlights real" with a reminder of the go into the formations and a general overview of anything that would be different from what we've done so far but i imagine most of it can be time lapsed.
i found it funny that you say a the planet isnt a cube when one of the best ways to limit distortion is a sphereafied cube. first few minuites of this shows it in action. ua-cam.com/video/sLqXFF8mlEU/v-deo.html
You could actually use a shrinkwrap modifier to basically draw boundaries on the sphere. It might actually be possible to simulate plate tectonics in blender too but that might be advanced
You might actually have an easier time using the grease pencil toolo to draw on the sphere and oater project the drawn features onto a texture on the surface
still near the beginning of the video, but i realized it’s probably raster paint in blender then vectorize, which reminded me of an idea i had while watching the last video. you could paint a heightmap in grayscale and then use either a smooth gradient map to see the heights more easily or use a stepped gradient map to get discrete color regions. blender has that in its colorramp node, so you could easily make a shader that did that in blender and do all the painting in blender, then export that, add a little of the other side to each edge, vectorize it (maybe some online tool, maybe illustrator has something decent built in), and there’s your vector version. because it’s limited colors and hard borders already, assuming you get the settings at least decent it should do a good job vectorizing it, or if you just want hard edges, you could leave it as is
10:20 it would also somewhat fix this, since you’d use a brush with a fair bit of falloff. and since it’s smooth, you could upscale the image before applying the stepped gradient mask, then downscale after, which would let the thresholding work with more resolution than your computer could handle drawing at
What an interesting video! As someone who's been using Blender for my mapping for a while - though not in this way specifically - I do have a few little quality of life suggestions. One big thing - for the triangles at the poles issue you were running into, what you *can* do is edit the sphere to have one additional loop before the pole, so the triangles are mostly replaced by actual columns except for the very very end. It's a little difficult to explain through text if you're unfamiliar with the software, but if that sounds useful to you I'd be happy to demonstrate via image sequence or clip or something. One more little thing is that having the sphere be the radius of your planet (divided significantly, of course, so 6.1m rather than 6100km) means you can also use blenders inbuilt area calculators to work out distances, which isn't a Very important part of this process specifically, but comes in handy for reference and so on. You can of course do the same in gplates, I just...prefer to do it in Blender. ETA: What you said about vector graphics has given me an idea, and I have just figured out a way to draw with and then export vectors in Blender. It is a far more involved process, but I'm going to go test this with some of my projects now. Thanks very much for the idea!
22:57 there is a way you can draw vector graphics in GPlates. For any of the geometry digitisation modes in GPlates, a vertex is placed every time a click is registered. There are a few free programs you can find that can automate clicks for you (e.g. OP Auto Clicker). Most of these can be configured to generate a click down to a millisecond interval, so it feels like vertices are being continuously placed; wherever you move your cursor will generate a line of vertices. There are some minor problems here (often cursor position is limited by display resolution which can result in raster-like lines at lower time intervals) but it does lend a basic drawing function to GPlates.
I just learned to use topologies for Gplates, but i am still struggling with something as basic as ocean crust getting in the way of one another, and I found myself rifting some of them just so my plates could shilft normally. Also, can I make flowlines out of my mid ocean ridges?
As someone who's decently knowledgeable, layers are actually the right way to think about what you were doing there! It's doing the same thing as you do in Photoshop with the way you have that set up at 6:30, the components are just more malleable than in Photoshop.
I'm going work on the sea topography next. Should I do this on-camera or off-camera?
On-camera = Like
Off-camera = Dislike
If it is off camera, I would just like to know how to calculate ocean depths.
Can you see how many dislikes you have?
@@ijahnnakehlam5919this
I'm not personally interested in much of the sea floor topography since not much happens under the sea. But a short example would be good I think
What's the score so far?
I would say definitely yay. There aren't a lot of resources that talk about how to work out ocean topography. Which is really a shame if you want to create a submarine culture.
"Planets- not cubes". Very informative. It's easy to forget this if you've played as much Minecraft as me.
*flashbacks to Spore, where cubelike worlds pop up fairly regularly*
Or you're from Bizarro world / Htrae.
@@KianaWolf Or you're here for D&D, and know about the plane of Acheron.
You can actually make a sphere from a cube in Blender and it sometimes maps things better than a UV sphere
Next you'll be telling me they found out how to square a circle.
Now that you're using Blender, would you want to render a realistic version of your planet, with water, different climates, clouds, etc?
11:23 There totally is a fix for that. It's in the UV Editing Tab. You can select and move the points on that overlaying grid manually, but there there is some other way that i just don't remember. I would bet my life on that, because this app has an option for everything.
I just tried messing around with it to figure it out, it's not worth it to change in your case, just leave it
@@forg3214 the map itself has to be edited at the poles for that to work, but it does work.
Have you tried to add thickness to the features? Would be nice to be able to stack them on top of each other at the rifting zones so they form canyons after separating. Not sure if the 3d scalar fields in GPlates, qgis, or blender would be best for this. Thank you.
You can do a lot with Blender.
One quick thing is turn your altitudes into greyscale (white being highest, black lowest.
Import that as an image texture, change your shader into something that accepts a bump map, add a sun light source and suddenly you’ll have higher terrain casting shadows.
Spend some time with some basic shading/lighting tutorials and you’ll quickly be able to see your planet from space!
Hell... yes!!!
Also, satellite mapping. If instead of a colour they use a texture they can make the map from space and, with a few tweaks like other textures (hydrography, bathimetry, etc...) they can make the planet from space
and painting a smooth heightmap would be easier to do all in blender, with a steppy colorramp (maybe the mode is called constant in blender, idr) to create something that could be automatically vectorized easily, optionally first upscaling it and downscaling afterwards to make that higher quality
could also create a realistic terrain shader (optionally using multiple smaller images at different scales and angles for filling in the smaller details) with a water shader based on depth, use temp/moisture to change the shader to be different biomes, etc to see it as if it were real
or set up images to use to blend between stuff, and then paint where stuff is. could be a bunch of work but could also do a separate mountain and dirt layer with different heights, where whichever is taller is shown, so that he boundary of exposed rock on a mountain could be moved by changing the heights
I am feeling so, SO vindicated right now. Ever since I said in the atlas map video that I use blender to draw on a sphere and you commented that "I would not recommend it" and here we are 🤣😜
You’re. God. Damn. Right.
Right? I've also used geometry nodes to transform a plane map into a sphere in Blender so I can hotswap between both shapes in the same program.
Blender is crazy-powerful and should never be underestimated.
@@jasonyesmarc309 absolutely. If you know what you're doing, you could do SO MUCH in blender. Almost anything really.
One of the great parts of being a programmer is that when you get an idea for a software, you can actually try to make it. I'm gonna try my hand at making a 3D cartography program like how you've described.
I wish you the best of luck!
Good luck!
My suggestion is to make it a Blender Add-On using Python. Pretty much all of the widgets you need are already there, they just need a little extra love to make them all gel as a cartography tool. Plus, you can animate your stuff and use the physics engine to collide stuff. :)
I think it'd be great to have a GUI setup like Autocad where you have a 3D sphere model to (vector) draw directly on and then you can create paper-space "drawings" with viewports using your preferred projection, centering, and zoom level. Of course just like Autocad you should be able to draw on those projections and alter the master model.
That way you could have your whole globe map to as much detail as you decide to do and create a detailed map of whatever part of it you need in the most convenient projection.
Good luck! Please update people with your results!
If you press 5 on your numpad, it will switch your view to orthographic instead of perspective. Also makes it so you can't accidentally zoom inside your mesh.
This has “Julia learns Blender for a Drawfee speed draw” vibes lol. It’s quite interesting tho, and I’ve enjoyed the video. Also learned that Blender is free. I do most of my work on my iPad (so Procreate and Vectornator mostly), but I wonder if I could do something similar in Nomad…
Seeing Drawfee on my Artifexian comment section is a crazy crossover
Aha, somebody else with this highly specific pairing of interests
i see the niche of "Drawfee and Artifexian fan" is not as empty as I feared
Procreate has a built in feature for drawing on 3d models, you can export the UV map of the drawing*. Which basically means draw on a sphere then export the mercator projection.
*I'm not 100% sure of that, but you can at least see the UV map.
@@lichenthrope__Dude, we are many.
It is possible to draw with vectors/splines using Blender's Grease pencil feature. You can set the stroke placement to surface, so it snaps on the surface of the sphere. After that you can bake these vector drawings onto the blank image texture of the sphere.
If you want me to go more in depth on how to do so please let me know.
(Though I must add that the way you are doing it is much easier and probably faster)
This is the best approach i can think of. Blender is extraordinarilly powerful.
I'm very much interested in the sea floor topography.
Being able to know where magnetic features, assuming the fictional world's magnetic poles flip like the Earth's do, isolated deep sea ecologies, and mineral deposits would exist, is all very useful.
Please don't skip over the stuff going on in and under the seas.
Blender does have a way to work with vector graphics, its grease pencil system is vector drawing/animation tool kind of like adobe animate, but its strokes can be projected into 3d space. However I don't know how you could render it to an image to import into illustrator.
I think if it's not to much trouble you could take both the blending of the cratons and sea topography and turn them into a big timelapse video.
If you noclip inside the globe in the wrong places, you end up in Biblaridion's Refugium.
"Maybe just be, but I think Picard is looking pretty tasty." -Edgar 2023
I’ve heard that from some women. I’m in no position to judge…
@@ColinPaddock Make it so.
I love Blender. It might be one of the most powerful creative tools mankind has produced, and it is a triumph of opensource philosophy!
This; I've never had a more positive experience learning a piece of software especially knowing how powerful it really is
It might be better to use a Icosphere instead of a regular sphere, modeling around the poles will probably get messy on a regular sphere
The reason the uv sphere is used instead of the icosphere is because it's texture is equirectangular already. The icosphere does not use an equirectangular texture map, so you'd need to do a lot more work to get it to work. If you weren't using an existing texture in equirectangular projection, then I completely agree tho
What projection would you use for an icosphere? Is it cleaner on a UV sphere? What about a round cube?
@@WeatherWonders For the icosphere, blender by default uses a Dymaxion projection which is essentially the net of an icosahedron. Another one that I might use is the orthographic projection (although it has a lot of distortion at the equator so maybe not ideal). For the round cube, the best net is is the "spherical cube" projection which is just the net of a cube
The issue you have at 11:10 can not be fixed, mathematically speaking, but you can mitigate it by using more geometry. When you create the sphere (at 2:34), increase the amount of rings (and segments, you might get weird results if your subdivisions are not square). 1280x640 was something my laptop did not like, but I did make him accept 512x256.
There are probably also methods to have a lot of geometry at the poles and little at the equator, but I'd have to think about how to do that.
Come to think of it, there might be a way to do the mathematically correct projection with nodes, but I'd have to think about that a bit more.
there is no way to correct the projection, unless you just mean fixing the gaps, which is actually doable.
pixels at the poles will be stretched no matter what you do, since it is a product of the equirectangular projection of a sphere.
If you wanted no distortion, you could use 1 map for the equator and another for the poles (polar projected), and blend between them.
It's not fixable with a UV sphere but a NURBS sphere, on the other hand, is mathematically correct instead of being a polygonal approximation of a sphere, and therefore doesn't have the problem of triangles at its poles like a UV sphere does. I'm uncertain if you can paint on the NURBS sphere in Blender but maybe you can; the node graph might need a few tweaks.
@@MightyBOBcnc the pixel stretching is impossible to fix though.
@@nahoj.2569 Correct. I was referring only to the issue of the polar triangle gaps. Projection distortion itself is an inherent feature of turning a 3D sphere into a 2D plane. There is no projection that is free from distortion, it's part of the math.
FYI: Increasing your Segments and Rings will reduce the size of the gapped triangles, by the way - has to do with the geometry of a UV sphere - the first set of polygons around the polar vertex are triangles and that's how Blender does the mapping.
QGIS is your perfect program for drawing on a sphere. But the learning curve for that is a whole mood and I can't endorse using it just for drawing these things.
it's great, but it is hard as heck. I want to see if i can model soils and climate with that. Plus, i’m trying to go into GIS professionally, so i have zero reason not to learn it.
@@jessehunter362 blessings be upon you my child. It should do really well with finding areas of overlap.
Using qgis for drawing on a sphere would be akin to using a calculator for an english exam.
I agree - with both statements. I spent some time converting a map to QGIS. Later realized I'd need to really refine my contours to get any thing decent looking in 3D, but it sure had me captivated for months. I tested a small island, and loved the scale change feature, and the ability to fly over it in 3D. BIG learning curve, but Edgar seems alright with those!
@@tripledeluxeguy I disagree. QGIS allows you to select different projections for working on different parts. Would I like an Illo program that can work on a sphere, baring that, QGIS gets it done.
To not get stuck in the sphere as often you can set the near clip plane. Press N to open view port properties, click View tab on side, reduce the number in Clip Start. It will also let you zoom closer to the sphere making the 1m radius sphere less annoying to work with.
The triangles at the top and bottom are due to UV unwrapping (how the image is projected to the sphere), there should be videos on how to unwrap spheres to use the entire image.
As for consistent brush size, I believe it's not possible for texture painting. In sculpt mode there's a Radius Unit option that you can set to Scene instead of View, but I don't think there's one for texture painting.
You could draw on the sphere using the grease pencil like a vector inside blender. It would be a completely diff workflow though.
hey Artifixean. if you are worried about the large flat plains you can add some gradient height. in real life when large mountain ranges erode all that crustal material has to go somewhere. Usually, aside from ending up in the ocean, it means a general rise of the surrounding low lands through deposition. an extreme modern example is the Tibetan plateau which is really just an accumulation of sediment from the surrounding mountains. while not always holding true especially in wetter environments its an easy way to add broad texture to flat lands.
Better to have seafloor topography and not need it than need it and not have it.
Technically Blender has something with grease pencils akin to a vector graphics program. You could try using those to draw on a sphere and then rendering it to an equirectangular image using a camera in panorama mode at the centre of the scene. Though I don't know if that's worth the hassle.
I know exactly your problem and the exact solution you want!
The unwrapped UV sphere is always going to have those triangles. The U axis is around the sphere and the V axis is perpendicular to that. All the quadrangles have to share a vertex at the poles, so they become triangles. There are two ways to get around this. You can replace them with an n-gon, so there would be a single flat face on the ends of your sphere. The better way for a globe is to warp a plane into a sphere. This is how that's done in a beginner-friendly way:
1: Delete the cube and add a plane to the scene.
2: Press 'Tab' to go into edit mode.
3: Press 'S' 'X' '2' 'Enter' to scale it on the X axis 200%.
4: Press 'Control+R' to create a loop cut. Move the mouse to make the pink line go the short way across your rectangle and primary click to confirm it.
5: Press 'A' to select all.
6: Press 'W' and select 'Subdivide' from the menu. Increase the iterations in the dialogue box or repeat until you have a good amount of faces.
7: 'Tab' back to object mode, and press 'G' 'Z' '1' 'Enter' to move your plane one Blender unit up.
8: 'Tab' back into edit mode and 'A' to select all.
9: Make sure you are looking at the front view by pressing 'NumPad 1'
10: Press 'Space' and type 'Warp'. Click on 'Mesh>Transform>Warp' In the dialogue box change the warp angle to 180 degrees.
11: Press 'R' 'Z' '90' 'Enter' so you're now looking at the side of half a cylinder.
12: Press 'Space' and reselect 'Warp'. In the dialogue change the angle to 360 degrees.
13: 'Tab' back to object mode. Lo! Yonder sphere is made from a flat plane!
You can either add the map texture before or after but it might be simplest to do that between steps 7 and 8 if you have problems. Enjoy your map painting!
Blender still deals with triangles for performance (as does probably all the other 3D software), so this doesn't prevent gaps; one of two triangles in each quad has no area in 3D space and will be missed in texture painting. Either way, I think editing a sphere would be a faster and more reliable way to get the triangle-shaped quads: delete pole vertex, extrude adjacent loop, scale to 0 at pole's location.
@@WeatherWonders Sure you could do it that way, but you do have to move the mesh or set the cursor to exactly the pole position on each side and since we're looking at equirectangular maps it's already perfectly unwrapped from the flat plane. There are usually many ways to do everything in Blender! I like this method for globes because I like the precision and not having to worry about aligning the texture exactly, which is what Artifexian was having trouble with, so I thought I'd share it. Whatever works! :)
I feel like you're thinking a bit too vector-based for the way Blender's texture painting is designed. Personally, I'd freehand paint terrain heights with a soft brush (white on black) and export that. You can then "posterize" it into distinct elevations with a filter in Photoshop or similar, and then have Illustrator auto-vectorize that output.
Depending on how detailed your painted height map is, that will give you a more or less detailed topography. You can even add some light noise or blur over it in PS before posterizing, in order to control the detail and "jaggedness" of your result.
Bonus: You can then use that painted height map in Blender for lighting purposes. A topographical map isn't quite as good of a basis for that because you lose all the detail between the distinct elevation layers. That detail is preserved in the un-posterized raster graphic.
I use something similar in my 2D maps to add a shadow to the elevations, just faked with the "bevel & emboss" layer effect instead. Can get decently close to a satellite-image-like look with it, even without actual sphere shading.
Seafloor yes please, it doesn't get nearly the attention it deserves
Definitely an episode of ocean topography with lots of time lapse maybe? Personally, I enjoy watching the map build up (or down in the case of oceans) with a mug of tea.
On a different note, would the high mountain regions of Picard interrupt the polar night jet?
I recommended the first part of Blender Guru's tutorial series. Would be good for learning the interface
great video!! i was wondering if you will ever use a 3D program for this series.
quick note: the distortion you had at 9:54 and 23:34 can be solved if you create a flat plane instead of a uvsphere and then wrap it around itself making it a sphere this will show the entire edge of your texture map instead of it cutting triangles at the top and bottom.
also. if you are using a tablet navigating with the middle mouse button is annoying and using the widgets on the sides is even more frustrating you should enable the "emulate 3 button mouse" feature in the edit > preferences > input > mouse, to navigate with the stylus (holding alt and dragging for looking around, alt + ctrl and dragging up and down for zooming in and out, alt + shift for moving around).
i know my explanation is terrible even for a person who understands blender so ill make a short UA-cam vid explaining it today
Love watching the world develop!
Quick gplates/geography question: What happens to the ocean crust after the supercontinent reforms and then breaks apart again? Do subduction zones tend to open up near the continental crust like the first go around, or do they open deeper in the ocean? Thanks!
I was kind of disappointed that he didn’t do at least a full cycle.
@@ColinPaddock I’ve been rewatching some of the tutorials + the world reveal, and I think the answer is subduction zones open near the continental crust (just like in the first supercontinent), then any ocean crust and mid ocean ridges get sucked up, creating Laramide style mountains
If you make your continents and prominent islands on separate layers, could you then move them around the globe after you've finished them?
Probably
I say YAY for seafloor topography, but I'm really enjoying all of this, so more is always better for me. :) Someday I will have the time and energy to do my own world.
It's not quite the same as this process, but I really recommend a tool that NASA's built called 'G.Projector' which is really easy to use for exporting these maps and runs on all OS's. It allows you to import a map projection and export it it in a different projection. I've fed topographic data into it using Mercator projections and converted it to others for art projects. It's also quite customizable with a large number of parameters allowing you to customize global and regional views and lists 200 different output projections.
Great app! But it doesn't quite work with polar distortion issues though :(
i dont know why i had no clue blender was free, if i ever have a computer that can handle it ill definitely have to try this :D
As someone who uses blender quite heavily, this is certainly the most... direct tutorial I've seen lol. I actually found it really fun. Good job
I'm a huge fan of topography in general. I'd love to see how you address the sea floor in your world given its well documented history.
Always look forward to these videos!
I think sea floor topography is basically the same as above sea kevel, with a few cavets, for example subduction zone trenches and the slightly raised areas on either side of spreading rifts. Not super necessary, but maybe for completeness?
On the topic of seafloor topography, I think that it would be a good topic for a video, but obviously I don't think you need to go too in-depth considering you aren't planning on an ocean civilization. However, some of the basics like continental shelfs, mid-ocean ridges, and ocean trenches would be good topics to cover. Also, one thing I've noticed is that this world has a lot less continental crust than Earth. Earth is covered by 40% continental crust while only having 30% land, which means that nearly a quarter of the continents are covered with water, just thought I would point that out. I appreciate all the effort you've put into this series!
If you plan on doing this particular stage of map making a lot, might be worth looking into substance painter. I've spent the last 3 years learning how to use blender for creating 3d models. It is a *fantastic* program and I absolutely love it. It's well laid out and very logical, and has a lot of capability to do so many different things. But the one thing everybody says it's not that great at is painting textures from the 3d view. I haven't tried it out myself yet, but I hear that substance painter is so much better. A lot of 3d artists workflows involve doing everything in blender until you get to the painting step, and exporting everything into substance painter. The downside is that substance painter is not free.
I can see this being REALLY useful for getting around distortion effects when you're doing Atlas-style maps of specific regions, especially once you get into higher latitudes.
One thing I do notice when I use blender is that I don’t have the Texture Shots or Snaps thing, is there anyway to have that so I can change the layer to my sketch layer?
I've used Blender in a more elaborate way to map my planets following Artifexian's older videos (with a written reference I made to make it easier to keep everything in my head). You can paint on a grayscale heightmap while viewing a nice visualization made with material nodes: color gradients for land and ocean (preferably matched to a real map) taking into account a water level map, topography lines, and overlays for maps with other types of information like tectonics. I'm not very happy with the distortion at the poles and might use a cube map or something fancier in the future.
I've considered making a tutorial for this, but it seems like it would only be practical if it assumes you already know how to use a few areas of Blender.
For clean labels Blender wouldn't work well. If I want to go further than Inkscape with labels I'll probably end up trying to use some real-world mapping software (like for OpenStreetMap).
The breaks in the line are likely cause by linear interpolation between the pixels at the wedges on the poles and the adjacent pixels outside the UV of the sphere. For 3D purposes, I'd recommend using a cube map instead, but that doesn't work for this project. Ironically, in Blender, sometimes planets ARE cubes.
For anyone who with an ipad.
Procreate has a built in feature for drawing on 3d models, and you can export the UV map of the drawing*. Which basically means draw on a sphere then export the mercator projection.
*I'm not 100% sure of that, but you can at least see the UV map.
It's a choice.
There is no way to draw on a texture without distortions. The basic problem of cartography: there is no way to project a sphere onto a plane without some distortions.
All you can do it chose how strong these distortions are, and where they occur, and chose your projection (UV map) accordingly.
There IS a way to draw on a sphere in Blender without any distortions. By using a high density mesh and vertex painting. But you need a really powerful machine to do that at a decent resolution. It can be a possible way, if you have that kind of computation power, or if you are satisfied with a lower resolution base map that you can improve in other, 2D programs.
And there is the method of using vector painting in Blender. Like in 2D, this gets rid of all the distortion and resolution problems... but it has practical issues. There is no simple way to stack polygons over each other. That means either getting really involved (yes, it can be done. But it's lot of work), or keeping it to lines only and doing the conversion into polygons in 2D software again.
There may even be other methods that I didn't think of. But I don't think there will be any without some disadvantage.
- in order to prevent going through your sphere, press Num-5 to switch to orthographic view
- in order to recenter your view onto the sphere, press Num-. or Num-, (depends on your localization, so whichever is on your Numpad is gonna be right)
- the triangles happen because of the finite resolution of your sphere. The higher you go with that initial resolution, the smaller the triangles will be. You are working with a faceted approximation of the sphere, not a perfect sphere. The reason they have to be triangles like that is basically the same reason why this type of map projection blows up the poles (single points) infinitely (into a line that definitely is not a point) - You are basically looking at a finite-resolution approximation of that. Anything outside those triangles will not even be seen by the sphere, so you technically don't need to draw those in, though I suppose for map-aesthetics you might want to anyways. Basically, at the poles is going to be where this is the least accurate.
- you can also try using an icosphere instead, which will have a different style, where the poles will only ever have exactly five triangles. Should make very little difference in the end result
- you can *also* try what's called a cube sphere: subdivide a cube a lot, then project it onto a sphere
which style of sphere you use doesn't really matter much I suppose. Perhaps one plays better with the projection than another.
Also, there technically *is* a way to vector-draw in 3D in blender. However it probably doesn't quite do what you want it to do yet. You'd get the outlines, but the fill might be off (it won't know to "stick the fill to the sphere" , basically).
Still worth a try perhaps: With Blender's Grease Pencil, you can draw in Project To Surface mode.
The main issue with that is that I'm not sure how you'd then get it out of Blender.
I think you *can* export SVGs, but it's not gonna flatten your lines into a map to make that actually doable. There *might* be ways to do it with Geometry Nodes though. This would require a bunch more setup, but you'd only have to build that once and could then just use the already done setup over and over.
if you press 5 on the numpad, it will put you into Orothographic View, which will allow you to zoom in farther without actually entering your geometry. You can also use the Camera widget in the top right corner to get into Ortho View as well. You can work around the pixel size by simply using a larger image size. I regularly use 4 and 8k image sizes to work on tiny details.
1. use G.Projector to re reproject ur polar map
2. draw polar map, like normal map
3. use G.Projector to reporogect it back
4. porift?
ps. in photoshop u have 3d model. And u can draw on a sphere
I think, you could make your own sphere without the triangle problem out of a single vertex with the help of the screw-modifier.
Just put the vertex where one of the poles of your sphere would be in edit-mode. Then leave edid-mode, apply a screw-modifier around the x- or y-axis for a half circle, and then a second one around the z-axis for a full circle.
Artifexian: planets are 3d spheres
Biblaridion when making the refugium: I'm gonna pretend I didn't hear that
You can use your elevation map as a displacement map as well, converting your colored topography map into 3d modeled typography automatically.
Very interesting! A couple of things I would like to note:
Funnily enough, the first thing you say "Planets are not cubes" might actually be best reversed to fix one of your problems. You saw those weird triangles messing you up? Well if you start with a cube and turn it into a sphere essentially by smoothing it out you don't get those.
Also you can use blender to generate noise on a sphere, this can be helpful in making little bumps or randomly placed forests. What is cool as well is that random noise can be weighted by a map you've drawn in. That way you don't get forests spawning in the middle of the ocean for example.
I would also be interested to see what can be done with simulation nodes. One idea is simulating weather on your planet, though I would venture a guess the world building community already has a tool for that...
i've been wanting to do this but wasn't sure how, cool video! also, woah, thanks for the texture painting eraser tip, i didn't know that and i've been blendering for a fair bit now... i think i need to brush up on texture painting a lil more, ha. normally i just paint over mishaps with the background colour or ctrl+z it, lol
Hey, when I click the link for the Worldsmith, it takes me to the Google Docs "about" page. Could you put a link to it on your website?
Hi Edgar, thanks for the awesome content as usual, it's always a pleasure to find out more is available!
That said, a question if I may.
I've been drawing my own map for a bit, for the most part following your previous shorter tutorial ATLAS MAP series, and one thing that always left me with an itch, and it's most likely something on my part, is that I never know how zoomed in I have to be drawing to make things accurate enough. As in, for example, in this video you're anywhere between 120% to 1300% zoomed in, but maintain the level of detail uniform over the whole of the map?
Personally I've struggled a bit because, especially at the beginning, I'd work at a certain level but then either increase or decrease and found myself that once I'd go back to 0% some parts looked a lot more detailed than others.
Is it just something we have to deal with or?
Replied before finishing the video, so I'll add something here.
Yes please, I'd like to see the ocean floors topography if it's not too much of a bother and, quite frankly, I'd take a short piece on the craton blending as well if it was for me, but I fully understand it might not be the most attention catching thing.
I suggest doing things more iteratively and using real-world references. Draw low-detail shapes, then zoom in and add detail. A consistent grid overlay (on the reference as well possibly) may help as well.
@@WeatherWonders I think the grid might jsut be what I need! Cheers
Does anyone else hear Artifexian talking about fjords and think Slartibartfast?
"Planets, not cubes"
Me who inaptly peeled potatoes into cubes: *visibly confused*
To stop from popping inside your sphere, change the clip as Blender default is far too large for most models. Also, in preferences, change 'orbit around selections' and use the numpad dot key to focus on any object you are working on.
I remember there was a trick to delete the pole point of the sphere mesh, extrude the last ring and move it to where the pole point was. This basically creates rectangles where the poleside line is infinitely short so in 3d it looks the same. But on the texture editor you don't have these triangles anymore but instead squares.
Now we are just missing a blender plugin that allows to project and edit svg files as texture images!
I think a cool application that would fit well here would be substance painter, it allows you to draw on 3d objects with photoshop / illustrator like layering systems and what have you.
It does come with a pricetag however so not everyone's cup of tea I understand, (currently $215 NZD for a perma license on steam).
It's primarily for texturing and baking purposes (so you'd still need to make your own models and uv's externally) but could be used for this kind of work if you would like.
I have used it before for making planets and is quite painfree if you know your way around photoshop you could probably find your way around the basics in substance. (Also tons of tutorials).
(It also loves things like heightmap calculations for textures, so you could model out your mountains in blender then bake that data onto a spherical surface for clean height details).
I've never even used Blender, but the thought occurred that you might be able to use several "layers" like in step ~3ish, for each of your relief elevations.
I think you can do 3d vector graphics with graphics tablet in blender with the grease pencil approach.
This could be useful for creating graphics for 360 video
My map was twice as wide as it was high but still didn't wrap correctly. The continent i put on the north pole looks like the lines on a lie detector test. What might i have done wrong
As a follower of Artifexian and someone who uses Blender for astronomy renders, I'm pretty confident I moaned loudly with this vid
10:54 that's because, when you created the icosphere, you set the rings to be 64. If you put more, the effect of the triangular faces close to the pole would get minimized but it is way more effort on the CPU and GPU
Fun fact: you could theoretically use blender for both satellite painting (you can use a whole texture instead of a colour to create a sorta satellite image map of the planet itself) and for renders of the planets themselves. If you want more info, I'd be happy to provide
mercator projection?
ppshh
I use macaroni projection, just requires a delicate state of mind.
I use blender for map making because A: Blender is Free, B: I have been using blender for over 5 years, C: You can basically make most of your projects in Blender.
This looks cool, but wouldn't it be easier to just import it back into gplates and then change the perspective so we can draw it correctly and then put it back to the perspective we wanted
Seafloor wise, i think it would be good to just do a "highlights real" with a reminder of the go into the formations and a general overview of anything that would be different from what we've done so far but i imagine most of it can be time lapsed.
YAAAAAY ON VIDEO! Please, i've never asked you anything
Does that also work with gimp a.k.a rasterized images?
Love the content!
Also, no offense, but I'm not gonna pretend I didn't hear that 0:11. Happens to the best of us.
If you mind me asking, what do you use to write your book for Artifexia? Or if anyone else knows I would be glad to hear a response
"Maybe just me, but I think Picard is looking pretty tasty." 👀
Maybe look up the Canadian Shield for ideas of what to do with extra old crust topography?
22:43 "Picard is looking pretty tasty" that's Patrick Stewart for ya lol
You were already a blender pro when you made this, you already knew to delete the default cube no matter what!
Whoo I was expecting it would be around time for the next episode
This is the only reason I am currently questing to learn blender.
i found it funny that you say a the planet isnt a cube when one of the best ways to limit distortion is a sphereafied cube.
first few minuites of this shows it in action. ua-cam.com/video/sLqXFF8mlEU/v-deo.html
Brush size can be set to relative I believe in any mode
I don't mind an episode on seafloor topography.
Insane that blender is getting good for worldbuilding
It’s been that way…
You could actually use a shrinkwrap modifier to basically draw boundaries on the sphere. It might actually be possible to simulate plate tectonics in blender too but that might be advanced
You might actually have an easier time using the grease pencil toolo to draw on the sphere and oater project the drawn features onto a texture on the surface
lololol, welcome to blender, boyos, lol
u have no idea how long ive wanted this video
Oh wow, I have a LOT of catching up to do!
Yes to seafloor topography.
i would like to see a sea version of this video
I’d say “yay” for sea topography
still near the beginning of the video, but i realized it’s probably raster paint in blender then vectorize, which reminded me of an idea i had while watching the last video. you could paint a heightmap in grayscale and then use either a smooth gradient map to see the heights more easily or use a stepped gradient map to get discrete color regions. blender has that in its colorramp node, so you could easily make a shader that did that in blender and do all the painting in blender, then export that, add a little of the other side to each edge, vectorize it (maybe some online tool, maybe illustrator has something decent built in), and there’s your vector version. because it’s limited colors and hard borders already, assuming you get the settings at least decent it should do a good job vectorizing it, or if you just want hard edges, you could leave it as is
10:20 it would also somewhat fix this, since you’d use a brush with a fair bit of falloff. and since it’s smooth, you could upscale the image before applying the stepped gradient mask, then downscale after, which would let the thresholding work with more resolution than your computer could handle drawing at
i know a bit of blender. when you have made a colored surface map i can maybe make a realistic-ish render of your planet from space if you like
What an interesting video! As someone who's been using Blender for my mapping for a while - though not in this way specifically - I do have a few little quality of life suggestions.
One big thing - for the triangles at the poles issue you were running into, what you *can* do is edit the sphere to have one additional loop before the pole, so the triangles are mostly replaced by actual columns except for the very very end. It's a little difficult to explain through text if you're unfamiliar with the software, but if that sounds useful to you I'd be happy to demonstrate via image sequence or clip or something.
One more little thing is that having the sphere be the radius of your planet (divided significantly, of course, so 6.1m rather than 6100km) means you can also use blenders inbuilt area calculators to work out distances, which isn't a Very important part of this process specifically, but comes in handy for reference and so on. You can of course do the same in gplates, I just...prefer to do it in Blender.
ETA: What you said about vector graphics has given me an idea, and I have just figured out a way to draw with and then export vectors in Blender. It is a far more involved process, but I'm going to go test this with some of my projects now. Thanks very much for the idea!
Sea Floor yeah
22:57 there is a way you can draw vector graphics in GPlates. For any of the geometry digitisation modes in GPlates, a vertex is placed every time a click is registered. There are a few free programs you can find that can automate clicks for you (e.g. OP Auto Clicker). Most of these can be configured to generate a click down to a millisecond interval, so it feels like vertices are being continuously placed; wherever you move your cursor will generate a line of vertices. There are some minor problems here (often cursor position is limited by display resolution which can result in raster-like lines at lower time intervals) but it does lend a basic drawing function to GPlates.
I just learned to use topologies for Gplates, but i am still struggling with something as basic as ocean crust getting in the way of one another, and I found myself rifting some of them just so my plates could shilft normally.
Also, can I make flowlines out of my mid ocean ridges?
As someone who's decently knowledgeable, layers are actually the right way to think about what you were doing there! It's doing the same thing as you do in Photoshop with the way you have that set up at 6:30, the components are just more malleable than in Photoshop.
WOOHOO!!!!!