Madness of a Modern Writer

This is the last article of the map-making series. What a ride it has been. About 75% of my total views for this website has come from my Worldbuilding series and that makes me quite proud.

Now, while this is end of the map-making portion, this is only the beginning of what comes next in the series. So stay tune for what comes next.

Today, we take your design and make a globe. Enjoy.

 

We’re not going to discuss any worldbuilding today as far as information. It has been a staple of my articles, but we’re just going to go right into the tutorial.

I recommend for your project to hit save-as and save (as *.pdn) and name it Final. Whatever name you have and put final at the end. Now make sure all the things you want for your map is checked. Leave the parts you don’t want, unchecked. Now, hit save-as again, and save it as a png image, name it whatever you want.

It will ask you to flatten the image, go ahead and do so. So now, your image is complete and you have a flat map. Now again, hit save-as, and save this one what you did your png file, but at the end, name it world or globe.

Enough saving for right now. Now with your png file in hand, let us begin.

World Making

1. Effects -> Render -> Shape 3D

There a few things to go over in this. You will see Axis-2. It moves along the y access. Move to where you want the planet to be focused on. At a later time, you play around with some settings, and figure out how this works, but I’m keeping it simple today.

Do note that my continents are a little too far north and south. This is a good reason not to do it, it looks tacky. I could say this is for your benefit to show you why not to do that, but I would by lying. Though you do see first hand why not to do it. Sometimes we make mistakes.

a. Settings in Top Half

Texture Map: Full Sphere Map

b. Settings in Bottom Half

Anti-Aliasing check On
Set Anti-Aliasing to 5
Uncheck Lighting.

c. Change Layer name: Globe DND

Press OK. Now we have your world. We can stop here, but let’s have a bit of fun. Now you will recall most of this from our star tutorial, but we are going to do a few additional things.

2. Create 3 New Layers
a. Change the names and arrange them:

Inner
Outer
Globe DND
Space

b. With the paint bucket, set the colour of space to black. This will help you see everything.

Here, we are going to make an atmosphere.

c. Set primary color to: 75C5FF
d. Go to Globe DND layer
e. With Magic Wand, select outside layer
f. Go to Outer Layer

Hit Delete
Press ESC

g. Effect -> Blur – Gaussian Blur

Do between 40 – 80. I did 40.

h. Go to Global DND layer

Select the outside again with Magic Wand

i. Go to Outer layer

Press Delete

It will look like we’ve done nothing. Like this was a waste of our time. However, we have done something. The very edge of our planet has a light blue. Can’t see it. Turn off the Globe DND layer, you should see a blue halo. I can’t show you a picture myself, as it doesn’t exactly translate. Now, let’s do the other part of this.

j. Go to Globe DND layer
k. With Magic Wand, select outside layer
l. Invert selection
m. Go to Inner Layer

Hit Delete
Press ESC

You should have a blue circle on top of your planet.

n. Effect -> Blur – Gaussian Blur

Do between 20 – 60. I did 40.

o. Go to Global DND layer

Select the outside again with Magic Wand, then invert selection

p. Go to Inner layer

Press Delete

q. Merge layer down.
r. Name Layer: Atmosphere

So now we have atmosphere. As you can see, it is similar to what we did with shallow water and beaches. Now we can throw in a black background and put in some stars and call it done, but how about a shadow?

3. Create New Layer

Name it: Shadow
Make sure it is on top of the Layer Box

a. Go to Globe DND

With Magic Wand, click the outside again, and invert selection

b. Set Primary color to black, make sure secondary color is white
c. Go to Shadow layer

Hit Backspace

Your world will now be a black circle.

d. Select the blue pointer in the tools

Use this to make your black circle twice the size of your planet. There are for points on the circle itself to drag. Ignore those. There are four additional ones on the outside that form a square. Drag the upper right one as far up diagonal as you can. Do the same to the lower left one, diagonal downward.

e. Move the black circle so the edge of it is covering half the planet.

Now a planet is never just night and day, one part dark, the other part day. So, we need to have a merging of the two.

f. Effects – Blur – Gaussian Blur

Set between 100 – 200. I chose 200.

f. Go to Globe DND layer

Select the outside with the Magic wand.

g. Go back to the Shadow Layer

Press Delete

At this point, half the planet is covered in black. We can’t see anything.

h. Go to Layer Properties

Set visibility between 220 – 245. I chose 230.

Now half the planet is in darkness. However, the Atmosphere is a bit bright for darkness. Let’s fix that.

4. Select Gradient Tool

Up top where we often set our options for tools, leave everything alone. You should see a colour wheel up top. Click that and select transparency.

a. Go to Atmosphere layer

Position your mouse away from your planet on the light side directly opposite of your shadow. Then click the mouse and hold it down, as you drag it across the planet. At first you won’t notice anything, but as you keep dragging, the darkside of the planet atmosphere will begin to show. Get the sides of the planet lit up, but leave the very edge dark.

So, we now have a planet, we have part of it dark, an atmosphere with a little showing on the dark side. So, how about some stars.

5. Go to Space layer
a. Effects -> Noise -> Add Noise

Intensity: 50
Color: 0
Coverage: 1

c. Select Magic Wand

Zoom in. You should see a lot of grey sparks. Magic Wand should be at 50%. Select the black area. Press Delete.

This gets rid of most of the stars. And we lost our black. We’ll get it back.

d. Select the open field again with magic wand.
e. Effects -> Selection -> Stylize Selection

Set the slider to white or fill in the boxes with three 255
Set Outline Width to 1
Check both boxes

f. Invert selection

Set Primary color to white, or hit the little arrow to swap the colours.
Press Backspace
Press ESC

g. Select Paintbucket.

Make sure Primary color is set to black
Click in the empty field.

So, there we have our stars. Just a few. Redo the steps above to create another set. This will make your currents stars bigger, while adding new ones in. Then follow these steps

6. Effect -> Noise – Add Noise

Intensity 90
Color: 0
Coverage: 1

a. Select Magic Wand

Set Tolerance to 80%
Press Delete
Set Tolerance to 50%
Select empty field again

b. Effect -> Selection -> Outline Selection

Same settings as before

c. Invert selection

Set primary color to white
Hit Backspace

d. With Paint Bucket, fill in again with black

So not only do we have a starfield. We have 3 layers of stars. 3 different sizes.

At this point, we are done. Save this as a PDN file, then you can save it as a PNG file. If you’ve made it this far, show your planet down below.

So, this is my final tutorial. We went from a blank page, to designing a flat map, to now a globe. The last two tutorials were just extra stuff to do, to make something fun. If you followed my steps and did as I did, i now encourage you to make your own map.

I am probably going to take a month off before I start my next Worldbuilding series. It should be great fun. Special thanks to Mr. Bobert for his tutorial that inspired this article.

I thank you all for your support, I had a lot of fun doing this. I never imagined that my tutorial would be so great or that anyone would find them very helpful.