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When real world mapping meets Tolkien
- rubidium 6y agoThis looks like a new hobby for me :) I want a “how to draw Tolkien maps” article by this guy that gives examples of trees, mountains, cities, etc... in a point by point way and the tricks to making the style work. There’s more on his website to learn from examples so I’ll start there I suppose: https://middleearthsmaps.com/pages/about https://middleearthsmaps.com/pages/about Edit: for some of the HN crowd, this one is likely of interest, https://middleearthsmaps.com/collections/my-favourite-square/products/san-francisco-california https://middleearthsmaps.com/collections/my-favourite-square...
- arethuza 6y agoSeems appropriate that there is one for Lauterbrunnen - the real life influence for Rivendell: https://middleearthsmaps.com/products/lauterbrunnen-switzerland?_pos=1&_sid=f45a9e428&_ss=r https://middleearthsmaps.com/products/lauterbrunnen-switzerl...
- lifeisstillgood 6y agoAm I the only one who was thinking "wow a bit of edge finding, a tolkien font and I have a business" Maybe not.
- dcminter 6y agoSounds viable to me!
- Cthulhu_ 6y agoNope; Google Maps has had april fools' projects a few times where they do something similar, like their 8 bit version: https://youtu.be/rznYifPHxDg https://youtu.be/rznYifPHxDg
- cstuder 6y agoOr use a pre-rendered map tiles and "just" replace the font: http://maps.stamen.com/toner-lite http://maps.stamen.com/toner-lite
- ragebol 6y ago- Do some edge detection, extract vector paths from those instead of just a bitmap, have a plotter with ink pen, plot! - ???, - profit?
- rytis 6y agoWhy not use vector data from OSM?
- jrimbault 6y agohttps://azgaar.github.io/Fantasy-Map-Generator/ https://azgaar.github.io/Fantasy-Map-Generator/ ? there are lots of options
- dagw 6y agoThere was a site posted here a couple of years ago where you could select an area in OpenStreetMaps and it be would stylize and carve it into a piece of wood using a CNC machine and send to you.
- samatman 6y agoThe difference between doing it and doing it well is huge, but not unsurmountable. It's worth a shot!
- macintux 6y agoThe site appears effectively abandoned, but I found this to be an interesting browse, effectively a GIS portal for Middle Earth: http://arda-maps.org http://arda-maps.org
- tutfbhuf 6y agoI would like to have a trained neural network that can generate Tolkien maps from existing map images and a filter for google maps or OpenStreetMap that can render the maps in Tolkien mode.
- dageshi 6y agoWhen I was travelling around Asia around 13-14 years ago I came across this map of Yangshuo https://www.alamy.com/stock-photo-china-guangxi-yuangshuo-ornated-tourist-map-of-yangshuo-with-drawings-15461655.html https://www.alamy.com/stock-photo-china-guangxi-yuangshuo-or... One of my favourite maps, the picture doesn't actually do it justice the other side had one covering a much larger area in the same style. I honestly think maps like this and in other fantasy styles would be better for people exploring a country.
- habi 6y agoHere’s what you can achieve with some OSM tools: http://anamnese.online.fr/carte/leaflet.html http://anamnese.online.fr/carte/leaflet.html This is via https://help.openstreetmap.org/questions/4496/how-to-create-fantasyimaginary-maps-with-openstreetmap https://help.openstreetmap.org/questions/4496/how-to-create-... and https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Ceyx https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Ceyx and https://www.cartographersguild.com/showthread.php?t=5409&page=2 https://www.cartographersguild.com/showthread.php?t=5409&pag...
- vmilner 6y agoI'd really like to see the fictitious Island of Sodor from Thomas the Tank Engine done in a proper UK Ordnance Survey map style! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sodor_(fictional_island) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sodor_(fictional_island)
- Wildgoose 6y agoFor those not checking the link, Sodor is based upon the real life Isle of Man.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- rkhassen9 6y agoCan't wait to try this! It's great to find an article on something that looks fun just for the sake of doing it. Would love to see more like this on HN.
- adflux 6y agoI'm sorry but I don't really think this is appropriate. Not only is he copying the maps Tolkien made himself, he is also copying his style and font typings almost 1:1... If this was open source work, sure. But he's charging quite an amount for something I personally consider plagiarism. EDIT: For anyone unaware, he's selling these on his personal site.
- madmoose 6y agoTolkien has been dead for a while now, I don’t think he minds.
- notacoward 6y agoJRR has been dead for a while, but his estate still exists and has been highly protective of his works (putting it kindly). They're the reason it took so long for a movie to be made, and why LOTR Online had to make up a bunch of stuff to fill in for inaccessible source material.
- matkoniecz 6y agoI am not convinced that copying style is somehow evil.
- adflux 6y agoNeither am I, I just think its icky.
- arethuza 6y agoHe's handy producing these things and gives a fairly detailed tutorial on how to do the same thing. As I love OS maps and Tolkien I really like this - I might even try and get him to do my local map square.
- adflux 6y agoHe does commissions aswell, if you check his website.
- anotheryou 6y agoI think stamen maps "toner" render is a good start :) http://maps.stamen.com/#toner/12/37.7706/-122.3782 http://maps.stamen.com/#toner/12/37.7706/-122.3782 (make sure to chech out the shading on watercolor too though!)
- KineticLensman 6y agoIMO the features look Tolkienish, but the fonts don't. Tolkien himself said 'I wisely started with a map, and made the story fit'. However, the geography itself isn't realistic. This is discussed in [0], with the tagline 'Middle-earth’s got 99 problems, and mountains are basically 98 of them.' In summary, the mountains are essentially linear features that create barriers useful from a plot point of view. The Misty Mountains run north-south, and form a right angle with the Ered Nimrais, which run E-W and separate Gondor from everything else. The Ered Nimrais themselves have a right-angle with the Ephel Duath, which are the western side of the three-sided square of mountains (!) that form the border of Mordor. The main river of Middle Earth - the Anduin - runs parallel with the Misty Mountains - and itself appears to emerge at 90 degrees from the Ered Mithrin, the mountains that run E-W along the top of the Middle Earth map. Real geographic features tend not to form right angles. [0] https://www.tor.com/2017/08/01/tolkiens-map-and-the-messed-up-mountains-of-middle-earth/ https://www.tor.com/2017/08/01/tolkiens-map-and-the-messed-u...
- throw0101a 6y ago> Real geographic features tend not to form right angles. Assuming they were created by normal geological processes and not magic. I could see why an evil wizard would want to create a 'natural' castle around his fortress with mountains.
- Naga 6y agoReading the article, the author posed that as the most likely (well, the only) explanation for Mordor.
- akjssdk 6y agoI think the author is also severely underestimating how early Tolkien starting working on his maps. The Hobbit (published in 1937) already came with a somewhat fleshed out map of the Misty Mountains and surroundings, and it is fair to assume that from this the remainder of Middle-Earth was fleshed out. (I cannot quickly find somewhere when he first drew a complete map of Middle-Earth, but Wikipedia notes that "The paper became soft, torn and yellowed through intensive use, and a fold down the centre had to be mended using parcel tape" [1]. So he probably knew what Middle-Earth looked like for quite some time, maybe even late 1930s? To presume that Tolkien would have had an understanding of the then state-of-the-art theories around continental drift is a bit hopeful. In fact, plate tectonics did come to be accepted until the 50s/60s, so Tolkien could barely have known of the theory when writing LOTR and especially not when drawing the initial map. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tolkien%27s_maps#The_Lord_of_the_Rings https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tolkien%27s_maps#The_Lord_of_t...
- ptrkcsk 6y agoSimilar: https://lordofmaps.com/ https://lordofmaps.com/
- iudqnolq 6y agoThis is tangentially related, but I want to call out the ordnance survey for making their data available. A large portion of their data is licensed under the UK's Open Government License. The map tiles themselves aren't, but they recently moved from a "call one of our partners for a quote" model for licensing to an extremely cheap and friendly model. In "development mode" you get rate limited to about one request per second but it's free, in "production mode" their hiking maps are $0.000046 per tile with the first ~$1,400 per month free. This made a hobby project of mine (an open source backpacking map for Android) feasible. I found it interesting that the previous situation seemed to be because they couldn't be bother/didn't have the resources to open up, not because they had a reason to want to keep things more restricted. My only remaining complaint is the license doesn't allow you to cache for more than 24 hours. All commercial outdoors maps apps allow caching for longer because you might be out of cell service for a few weeks, and I wish I could offer this feature. I'd be totally fine if it cost more. Edit: fyi, my number doesn't match their pricing page because I changed the unit to make more sense to someone not super familiar with maps and converted to USD.
- vchuravy 6y agoWhat's the name of your app? I have been looking for something like that. OS maps really are fantastic.
- iudqnolq 6y agoI made the questionable choice to write my map renderer from scratch, got it barely working, then got bored and abandoned the project at least for now. When I finish my current pet project I plan to replace it with an existing renderer and focus on the hiking/backpacking specific features I can add. If you want something that actually works I highly recommend Gaia. They only have OS's driving maps built-in, but you should be able to manually add OS's leisure maps. Reasonable usage will definitely fit within OS's free tier, but you'll probably need to pay Gaia for pro. Disclaimer: I've worked with the tech this described a lot, but not actually done the steps I'm suggesting. See: https://osdatahub.os.uk/docs/wmts/overview https://osdatahub.os.uk/docs/wmts/overview https://help.gaiagps.com/hc/en-us/articles/360047068634-How-to-Import-ArcGIS-WMTS-Map-Sources https://help.gaiagps.com/hc/en-us/articles/360047068634-How-... My WIP project: https://github.com/danielzfranklin/backpackingmap https://github.com/danielzfranklin/backpackingmap
- Isamu 6y agoHere I thought it would be about spotting an Apple Maps horse cart being drawn through the Shire.
- zo1 6y agoOff topic. Wow - one of the images on that page had me dizzy. Seems to be triggering some sort optical illusion effect that does not play well with my head. First time I've encountered something like this, despite looking at many optical illusions and "seizure-triggering" content in the past. https://www.ordnancesurvey.co.uk/image-library/newsroom/blog/2-drawing.x017d165e.png?q=70&f=webp https://www.ordnancesurvey.co.uk/image-library/newsroom/blog...
- danaris 6y agoUrgh. Yet another place using the terrible example of the movies where it comes to the LotR typography. The three little dots over the letters are a diacritic used in Tengwar (the elven script). The movies used them (and, IIRC, a couple of the other Tengwar diacritics—there are several) to give the English maps drawn in-universe by Bilbo a "Tolkienian" quality. It would be like pûttïng ràñdóm åccênt marks over letters to give it a "foreign" quality: sure, it looks all fancy and exotic to your average American who never learned a second language, but those marks mean something and you're using them wrong. For reference, here's[0] what part of the map Tolkien made actually looks like. Some of the words do have diacritics, but they're meaningful ones (eg, Gwathló), and none of them are elven diacritics. [0] http://topazgryphon.org/middleearthnorthwest.png http://topazgryphon.org/middleearthnorthwest.png
- stakkur 6y agoThis reminds me of a recent mapmaker I discovered (and ordered a map from): https://lordofmaps.com/ https://lordofmaps.com/
- B1FF_PSUVM 6y ago> I draw on A5 (210 x 297mm). Typo there, that size is A4. Size A5 is half that, 210 x 148 mm