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- Nov 16, 2018
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I've been getting into virtual cartography lately. There are many different ways to make maps, but my process is pretty simple. I screen cap from the world map web site, then line the caps up in photoshop, draw some vectors on them, and end up with things like this, which I can then put words and lines on.
Old Bellisseria isn't a massive area, and my technique does not require pixel perfect screen cap stitching, so I just lined stuff up by hand and drew over it.
I want to work with larger land masses now, though, so I want to stitch together massive amounts of screen caps, and do a map of all contiguous mainland continents. In the future I want to be able to just crop out the part of the mainland I want to work on from a huge high-rez screen capped map, and make my own map with it. On github, I found a python script that will pull down all the region map textures you want directly from the linden lab server, and stitch them together, but the script is not user friendly, so I decided to get the screen caps by hand and then use a program to stitch them together.
I thought this should be easy, because photo stitching software is really good with photographs now. Even my phone can stitch nice panoramas, and I have seen my astrophotography friends do amazing things with photo public domain stitching software from NASA. Turns out, photo stitching software is garbage for flat documents.
Here's what I've done so far, and why I'm hand stitching everything now:
I capped by going to maps.secondlife.com, closing the side bar, zooming into the area I want as far as possible, then hitting the little minus button on the top left hand corner to zoom out one step. Then I used the Windows 10 snipping tool to cap from the page. This is how I took every single screen cap that I want to stitch together. They are all the exact same scale and rotation, so there is no need to zoom or rotate or twist or otherwise mutilate my screen caps in order to stitch them together.
I tried Photoshop, Lightroom, and software from Microsoft called Image Composite Editor (AKA ICE), that was discontinued last year, but I found a link to download the last version here. Photoshop was an overly complicated process, but it worked ok. Lightroom gave pretty good results, but it was extremely slow. ICE gave the best results, it was easy to use, and it was fast.
All of these methods failed a lot. When it failed, I would have to try stitching together less screen caps at a time, or change the order of the regions I'm screen capping, and that would usually make it work, but sometimes I had to go back and re-cap entire regions to get it working. ICE was great when I capped from top to bottom, left to right, like a camera might scan, but it wasn't as good when I capped randomly. So using stitching software is time consuming, but it can still work... except...
The real problem is, all 3 of these methods twisted and pinched and resized and rotated my images, when they didn't need it, at all. My images are all the same scale, so they just need to be lined up. I never found a setting to do this. Photoshop's auto-aligner has a place where you can tell it to reposition only, but it fails often enough that it makes the process not worth my time.
If you want to see a demonstration of the two approaches, look at these two maps I made of the contiguous mainland (WARNING: Massive files. ICE is 22k and hand stitched is 26k). ICE did a better job than Photoshop and Lightroom, so this is the best I can do with stitching software, so far.
ICE Stitched Map
Hand Stitched Map
The one with the black background was made with ICE. It was so twisted after I let it align all the continents that I just aligned the continents by hand, after using ICE to make each continent map. So it's mostly ICE. The one with a transparent background was made by hand, from the ground up. I literally zoomed in to the pixel level and played with transparency, in order to line up every single screen cap by hand.
Look at how the ICE stitched map still twisted the continents, though. In this image, I put the northern continents side by side, and put a grid over them, to show that the ICE map on the left side twisted and rotated the screen caps so that the edges of the captures are no longer perfectly horizontal and vertical like in my hand stitched map on the right side.
On top of that, my hand stitched map has none of the weird discoloration the automated stitchers create. If I wanted to, I could just publish the hand stitched image as is. The one on the left isn't quite ready for prime time, though.
Hand stitching the entire mainland like this takes a full day, but so does fighting with the automated stitching software, and doing it by hand just gives a better result.
There has to be a better automated way to stitch images, but I can't find it. Does anybody have any suggestions?
Old Bellisseria isn't a massive area, and my technique does not require pixel perfect screen cap stitching, so I just lined stuff up by hand and drew over it.
I want to work with larger land masses now, though, so I want to stitch together massive amounts of screen caps, and do a map of all contiguous mainland continents. In the future I want to be able to just crop out the part of the mainland I want to work on from a huge high-rez screen capped map, and make my own map with it. On github, I found a python script that will pull down all the region map textures you want directly from the linden lab server, and stitch them together, but the script is not user friendly, so I decided to get the screen caps by hand and then use a program to stitch them together.
I thought this should be easy, because photo stitching software is really good with photographs now. Even my phone can stitch nice panoramas, and I have seen my astrophotography friends do amazing things with photo public domain stitching software from NASA. Turns out, photo stitching software is garbage for flat documents.
Here's what I've done so far, and why I'm hand stitching everything now:
I capped by going to maps.secondlife.com, closing the side bar, zooming into the area I want as far as possible, then hitting the little minus button on the top left hand corner to zoom out one step. Then I used the Windows 10 snipping tool to cap from the page. This is how I took every single screen cap that I want to stitch together. They are all the exact same scale and rotation, so there is no need to zoom or rotate or twist or otherwise mutilate my screen caps in order to stitch them together.
I tried Photoshop, Lightroom, and software from Microsoft called Image Composite Editor (AKA ICE), that was discontinued last year, but I found a link to download the last version here. Photoshop was an overly complicated process, but it worked ok. Lightroom gave pretty good results, but it was extremely slow. ICE gave the best results, it was easy to use, and it was fast.
All of these methods failed a lot. When it failed, I would have to try stitching together less screen caps at a time, or change the order of the regions I'm screen capping, and that would usually make it work, but sometimes I had to go back and re-cap entire regions to get it working. ICE was great when I capped from top to bottom, left to right, like a camera might scan, but it wasn't as good when I capped randomly. So using stitching software is time consuming, but it can still work... except...
The real problem is, all 3 of these methods twisted and pinched and resized and rotated my images, when they didn't need it, at all. My images are all the same scale, so they just need to be lined up. I never found a setting to do this. Photoshop's auto-aligner has a place where you can tell it to reposition only, but it fails often enough that it makes the process not worth my time.
If you want to see a demonstration of the two approaches, look at these two maps I made of the contiguous mainland (WARNING: Massive files. ICE is 22k and hand stitched is 26k). ICE did a better job than Photoshop and Lightroom, so this is the best I can do with stitching software, so far.
ICE Stitched Map
Hand Stitched Map
The one with the black background was made with ICE. It was so twisted after I let it align all the continents that I just aligned the continents by hand, after using ICE to make each continent map. So it's mostly ICE. The one with a transparent background was made by hand, from the ground up. I literally zoomed in to the pixel level and played with transparency, in order to line up every single screen cap by hand.
Look at how the ICE stitched map still twisted the continents, though. In this image, I put the northern continents side by side, and put a grid over them, to show that the ICE map on the left side twisted and rotated the screen caps so that the edges of the captures are no longer perfectly horizontal and vertical like in my hand stitched map on the right side.
On top of that, my hand stitched map has none of the weird discoloration the automated stitchers create. If I wanted to, I could just publish the hand stitched image as is. The one on the left isn't quite ready for prime time, though.
Hand stitching the entire mainland like this takes a full day, but so does fighting with the automated stitching software, and doing it by hand just gives a better result.
There has to be a better automated way to stitch images, but I can't find it. Does anybody have any suggestions?