On Sun, 2009-12-20 at 21:16 -0800, owntheweb wrote: > http://old.nabble.com/file/p26869227/mapDesign1A.gif > > Hello gurus, > I'm hoping to make a galactic map of the fictional galaxy from the > EVE-Online game. I have the data (x,y,z coordinates). I set a style game > plan (seen above, created in Illustrator). I've done some research and > created a couple "Hello world" images. Now I'm guessing I need to create a > shapefile?
Are you using the 'z' values for 3D data? If so then Mapnik may not work for you. It currently only does 2D maps and typically ignores the z value of a 3D geometry. > One tool that may be helpful is Shapelib. There's some documentation at: > http://shapelib.maptools.org/shapelib-tools.html > > Using shapelib though, I'm not sure what kind of numbers/scale I should be > using. The polygon example from the link above uses numbers like 100000 to > 7000000. Is there an ideal scale to use? Is there another shapefile > generator you would recommend? Where would the labels go? The scale is arbitrary and can be whatever you want. Often it is in degress (lattitude/longitude) or metres or feet. In your case it could be millons of km, light-years or whatever make most sense to you. The labels would end up in a field (column) in the DBF file If might be easiest to put all the data into a csv file: x,y,z,name http://www.gdal.org/ogr/drv_csv.html Then you can either convert this to a shapefile or mapnik may be able to read this directly via the ogr driver. > http://old.nabble.com/file/p26869227/Picture2.png > > Here's an image of the entire galaxy rendered in Flash. It would be awesome > to get this thing in a slidy map instead (better usability for a fun in-game > project). > > I'd appriciate any feedback you may have. Please be kind as I'm new to > mapnik. If anything though I should have a map of my hometown running soon. > Mapnik rocks my world. Handling 3D will probably be the biggest issue with Mapnik. If you know what you are doing then you could transform the data to let you see the map from an arbitrary 3D viewpoint before sending the data as 2D to Mapnik. If you really want a flexible 3D rendering then you might need to look at something which is designed specifically for this, like http://www.blender.org/ Jon _______________________________________________ Mapnik-users mailing list [email protected] https://lists.berlios.de/mailman/listinfo/mapnik-users
