@NexTerren Before the opportunity is lost, you are most definitely a booger creature.

@DaaaahWhoosh That's snot very nice.

@ThomBlairIII If you don't mind my asking, why did you delete your Blender answer? Even though it's not made for what the OP's asking for, I've heard it recommended quite a lot.

I almost added a footnote about it in my answer, but I don't know enough about it.

Hi!

@HDE226868 I started feeling like it might be WAY too complicated, plus, it didn't fit OPs needs for showing coordinates where his mouse was

You could just draw it on a flat map that has a longitude and latitude grid on it already...that would be best I think

@ThomBlairIII That's true. Blender's not very simple.

I'm not sure why he wants it on a sphere

@HDE226868 blender gave too many people reason to coin the phrase "rage quit"

unfortunately

it is so bad that even after using graphics software since I was 13 and even working professionally with 2D and 3D software, I couldn't even make a cube after 5 minutes of first trying to use it!!

I'm 43 now

@ThomBlairIII I draw most of my maps on flat Mercator-style projections, because they're generally small, fantasy-esque stories, but if I'm considering a new planet in a story involving space travel, I do want to get a feel for how it would look like from space, to get an idea of the feel it projects.

I had to watch so many tutorials on it, but once I did, it became a really really neat piece of software

@HDE226868 Oh interesting!

I did a model of the earth, complete with night and day cycles and city lights at night and cloud cover, then animated it

but, I'm not sure it'd be worth it for just a printed text story

Ooooh. That sounds amazing.

If you want, I can find the tutorial video on how to make it

Just a second

@HDE226868 Here you go: blenderguru.com/tutorials/create-a-realistic-earth

@ThomBlairIII Awesome. Thank you so much.

Andrew Price does a lot of really amazing, advanced tutorials

the problem with his tutorials is they are above beginner level

But, you can watch and get a feeling for how it works

If you ever want to get into Blender, I can point you in the direction of tutorials for making things, how to get started

I'm not sure, but after looking at SE's Blender site, it seems to have died maybe, idk

They (we) used to have a really great site, but a lot of things have changed both in Blender and on their site

I quit Blender when they stopped making it fully reverse compatible with previous versions...it was frustrating to have some of my main projects no longer work properly in parts

@HDE226868 This was my favorite project I was doing when they stopped being reverse compatible: m.youtube.com/watch?v=3qFYwbL5mNs

@ThomBlairIII My main experience with computer modeling is using CAD, and Autodesk has been pretty good about backwards compatibility, in my experience. That's got to be annoying.

Oh, wow, CAD and Autodesk! Yes, those are awesome!

They have good funding and everything

@ThomBlairIII Wow.

Blender is just made basically on a pseudo voluntary kind of basis...

Some of the core people might be getting paid, some probably are I imagine,

@ThomBlairIII It's expensive, though. I've just used the various (free) student versions.

Autodesk bought Maya...it used to be the gold standard on non sillicone graphics machines

omg, so many typos when I type

Yeah, that's one of the biggest draws for Blender....free!

If people can stand to learn it, and tolerate the bugs, it can make stuff that looks like pixar to me

Do you have fast internet?

Not particularly, no. The college wifi can be a bit slow.

Oh, yeah, I can't watch youtube except between 9am and 5 pm, when everybody is at work

after that, I can barely load a video at 280 or whatever the lowest resolution is

bummer

But, when I'm at my Dad's house, we've got fiber optic there, so we get 7MB/s!!!

It's like heaven after visiting with my Mom

Oh, you're into astrophysics!

My cousin is a astrophysics professor at a college...

Shawnee College: shawnee.edu/academics/natural-sciences/faculty/thamilton.aspx

His wife is also a physics nerd/professor....she does general relativity etc, while Tim does quasars and stuff like that

Wow, so you're really good with math...that's cool!

I wish I had a math-capable brain

@HDE226868 Well, feel free to ping me if have any questions about making a model of your planet (or anything else). Maybe I could put your 2D map on a sphere so you can see what it looks like

Clouds too, if you want

@ThomBlairIII Sorry, I was away from the computer. Yeah, I'll let you know if I start to get somewhere far enough in the project. :P Thanks for the video links.

@HDE226868 No problem! PS...Bryce 3D might be something world builders might be interested in, if it's still around

@HDE226868 If you ever want to try putting a 2D map onto a sphere in Blender, this question might help: blender.stackexchange.com/questions/8697/…

Sometimes I get the impression that while world-building is fun, people who ask questions about it here probably shouldn't be writing stories. Shouldn't people rely more on their own fantasy and research capabilities?

@Nobody You could make the same argument for Stack Overflow, honestly.

@Nobody I agree, I'm just here for the fun though.

@HDE226868 True, but I'm more pragmatic about coding than about writing stories.

@Nobody The argument I like is that worldbuilding is such a diverse subject. I'm reading Green Mars right now and there's so much biology, geology, meterology, physics, economics, and politics involved that I don't understand how Kim Stanley Robinson was able to gather so much knowledge in a single lifetime.

And really, humanity is all about collaboration. We rose above our competitors when we figured out how to pass along knowledge. To try to make something completely by yourself is admirable, but almost nothing humans ever do is ever going to be completely their own.

So whether you got your information from research or from asking someone who has already done the research shouldn't make a difference. Either way, you're deriving benefit from the work of others. So I say as long as you pass along that benefit, you're not doing anything wrong.

I think I skipped a few steps in my argument, but I'm typing this on a phone.

@DaaaahWhoosh Of course you build on the work of other people. But if you have to ask basic questions of the kind which are answerable here, that often implies a lack of understanding of the general topic which will make the answer useless to the asker because the asker will miss some other consequences of the answer which couldn't be explicitly given because the answerer doesn't know all the details (maybe the asker doesn't yet either).

@Nobody sometimes even if you think you know something, it's best to throw it out here anyway as other folks will most likely have pieces you're missing

never mind reality-check

that's useful right then and there

@Shalvenay Sure - but you can only do that for non-significant amounts of your novel, even if it's a short one.

That's why people have test readers, those get the whole picture.

@Nobody not everyone here implements their world in novel form

@Shalvenay Well as soon as it's more than a couple of scenes, no matter the medium, it will contain too much for a couple of questions.

@Nobody I think a lot of questions here aren't about scenes, chapters or pages so much as they are about premises. That, I think, is why the site can stand on its own at all. For instance, my last two questions have been at the core of what I'm writing about, but they don't have much to do with the storyline itself (although I'm sure you could make an educated guess or two).

@HDE226868 Hmmm.

@HDE226868 seconded -- they're about premises, assumptions, and the like