Friday, April 24, 2009

Of dimension and projections...

So after an initial focus on antique map styles, then game map forms, then illustrative cartography, I've been moving in more technical directions the past few weeks - doing a lot of work with creating 3D terrain effects for maps, as well as reprojecting NASA's Blue Marble Next Generation (BMNG) RAW data to create hyper-accurate background maps.

The area surrounding Alesia, with 3d terrain and edge displacements...

NASA BMNG data of the Pacific, reprojected on an Albers equal-area cone...

2 comments:

Unknown said...

The equal-area projection reminds me of the map from VG's Pacific War game. I still remember looking at the map excerpt on the back of the box before I bought it and becoming horribly confused by the unusual (to me) equal area map projection.

The shapes of the land masses were different and I had a really hard time figuring out where north was. I still bought the game, and after reading the design notes, I thought that an equal area map was a brilliant move for representing such a large area. In particular, it helped show why there even was an Alaska campaign.

Mark Mahaffey said...

Indeed! You will be pleased then to hear that this is precisely what it is, this will serve as the basis for the redux of "Pacific War" that Mark Herman is currently working on.