@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.
@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!!
@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.
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
@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.
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
If you want to see some of the Blender demo reels, they release one every year: https://www.google.com/search?q=blender+demo+reel&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&hl=en-us&client=safari
@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
@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.
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 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
@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).