Mapmaking?

[TJ Sinclair]

Honestly, I'm not sure if this belongs here or in Trek Tech, but given the practicalities involved, I figured I'd try here first.

I've long been a cartophile, and I love books like Star Charts, Stellar Cartography, and the rest, as well as all the many fanmade maps that chart the Trek universe.

But other than basically freehanding it in Photoshop, GIMP or (in the olden days) MS Paint, I've never been successful in making one myself. How do the fans who make their own Star Charts-style maps make them? What programs? What techniques? Are there any tutorials out there?

 

[Rekkert]

The very few star charts or LCARS based maps I've done were always on Inkscape, I found it super easy to learn and perfect for the task.

 

[uniderth]

Inkscape is my go to as well. However, I've been itching to find some way to make 3D maps using Blender or Space Engine.

 

[publiusr]

In some real star charts--the stars are depicted as black on a white background.

I'd like to see some trek charts with that set-up.

 

[Doctor Tiki]

... other than basically freehanding it in Photoshop, GIMP or (in the olden days) MS Paint, I've never been successful in making one myself. ... Are there any tutorials out there?

Stellar cartography is mostly a data analysis job and then only later an artistic act. Take a look at this: https://www.thisiscolossal.com/2015/11/ed-fairburn-map-portraits/ where the map maker added distinctive artistic features to star charts. The same way, galaxy maps are mostly the background to which the art in Star Trek is added later. For instance, certain planets and nebula are real, while the Romulan space is artistically added. That means, your attempts to create ST universes are doomed to fail, if you don't have fundamental maps and fundamental data about the galaxy. This is different to video-game science fiction in which the galaxies are made up.

 

[TJ Sinclair]

Stellar cartography is mostly a data analysis job and then only later an artistic act. Take a look at this: https://www.thisiscolossal.com/2015/11/ed-fairburn-map-portraits/ where the map maker added distinctive artistic features to star charts. The same way, galaxy maps are mostly the background to which the art in Star Trek is added later. For instance, certain planets and nebula are real, while the Romulan space is artistically added. That means, your attempts to create ST universes are doomed to fail, if you don't have fundamental maps and fundamental data about the galaxy. This is different to video-game science fiction in which the galaxies are made up.

I understand all that, and frankly, it's not relevant to my question, which was specifically about what computer programs to use to draw/render the maps once you have all the data you're talking about.

 

[Doctor Tiki]

Well, for prototyping you can use MS Paint, any ASCII / ANSI art editor for pre-web retro-computer style. On the 3D prototyping, you can use MagicaVoxel and its cousin Aerialod for Minecraft-esque/LEGO styles. You can use actual LEGO editors, like LDraw. Once you have a prototype that sort of works out, you write with Python a conversion of the data into 3D objects in Blender. Once you have the Blender model, the next question is texturing and lighting. After that, you do rendering, which is mostly a command-line thing. From there, you get some sort of JPG out and add your artistic emblems for empires and zones.

 

[Doctor Tiki]

Alternatively, you import the Blender models into Javascript that activate WebGL in the browser and work on Javascript files that do texture and rendering. Three.js is very active in that space.