Conmap

If you've thought about the geography of your planet, you'll eventually need a ConMap to organize the information. This section deals with how to make good, realistic, and eye-pleasing maps.

Table of Contents

• Getting Ready
• Projections
• The Basic Outline
• Nations
• Mountains
• Thematic Maps
• Finishing Touches
• Examples of Conworld Maps

Computerized mapping

Mapping software tools provide a wide array of options for creating maps at many different levels as well as rendered scenes of landscapes based on those maps.

• L3DT by Bundysoft, a comprehensive commercial terrain modeling solution
• Fractal Planet by Tim Day, an open source tool for Linux that generates a detailed global terrain map for a single planet; can generate global maps, flat square maps, or flat hexagonal maps
• StarGen by Jim Burrows, a non-mapping program that generates a solar system as a spreadsheet containing orbital distance and planetary mass numbers
• Planet Generator by Torben Ægidius Mogensen, a command line planetary map generator offering several different map projections; open-source and delivered as C code
• TerraJ by Martin Smith, an open source Java cross-platform solar system generator combining Fractal Planet, StarGen, and Planet Generator
• Fractal Mapper by Nbos Software, a commercial tool targeted at maps more similar to human-drawn maps than the above software
• GeoMorph
• AstroSynthesis by Nbos Software, a commercial star-mapping tool that maps the positions of groups of nearby stars in 3D
• Wilbur by Joe Slayton, a free digital terrain sculpting application for Windows
• Daylon Leveller by Daylon Graphics, a commercial terrain sculpting application for Windows
• Terrain building tutorial Part 1 and Part 2 from ME-DEM, the Middle Earth Digital Elevation Model project, a detailed tutorial linking together a number of the tools listed above
• The Galaxy galaxy generator by Dmytry Lavrov
• Terragen by Planetside Software, a commercial terrain generator and rendering application
• G.Projector by the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies, a free cross-platform Java application that can reproject a map from a cylindrical projection to a Mercator projection, for example
• AutoRealm is an open source mapping utility for creating maps of castles, dungeons, and cities

External links

• map tools wiki