Never in my life did I think that it would be this hard to make a globe. The following is a long, drawn out saga of how my relationship to this project broke down and needed serious counseling.
I decided to go with my idea of making a paper globe with stand, and putting a light inside so I could poke holes into all of the places I've been. I thought it would be a neat little multidisciplinary project that I could keep as a sculpture in my house.
Almost as soon as I had started, I knew this was not going to be as easy as I thought.
Making a paper sphere? That's easy. Designing a stand for it? Done. Putting the countries in their correct places with correct scale? Houston, we have a problem.
In class last week, I told Bryan about my dilemma. I just couldn't figure out how to get these countries in their places! He suggested that I attempt to reverse the Mercator Projection process by wrapping a map onto a cylinder, then projecting it onto a sphere. Genius!
So off I went to put a map onto a cylinder, expecting the task to take me a few hours of research at most. Within a day of beginning, I was frantically emailing Bryan and posting in multiple online forums. Houston, we STILL have a problem.
My process began as follows:
1. Find a vector map of the world under a creative commons license. I ended up using this one from Wikimedia for my first attempts, and later used this Cylindrical Equal Area Projection after realizing the distortion on the Mercator was incorrect.
2. Clean it up and import it to Rhino. Easy.
3. Create a cylinder and then unwrap it with UnrollSrf to get a planar rectangle of the same size and shape of the side of the cylinder.
4. Scale the map to the rectangular plane I just made.
5. Use FlowAlongSrf to put the map onto the side of the cylinder.
6. Repeat this process in as many different ways as I could think of and making slight adjustments each time, because FlowAlongSrf just would not work. Cue frustrated screams into a pillow.
No matter what tweaks I made to my process, FlowAlongSrf would only leave me with a vertical planar copy of my original curves. I tried using UnrollSrfUV instead of UnrollSrf, I tried doing it one half at a time, I even tried using simple curves to see if that would work. Nothing worked.
At this point, I started reaching out to the internet for help. First to Bryan, then to the official Rhino forums. Getting no response from either, I began to brainstorm alternate options.
I considered simply using the flat pattern of the sphere and distorting the map onto it, but I got stuck when trying to figure out how much to distort each area by. Using the Cylindrical Equal Area Projection would squish everything up towards the poles, where the Mercator Projection would still cause a distorted and incorrect map. I was stumped.
I noticed that in the Rhino files, there are two files of a world map - day and night. I made a sphere and applied one as a material map - aha! A perfect globe. Now, can I find a way to make a papercraft out of this?
First, I tried to simply put this pattern onto a mesh sphere instead of the perfectly rounded sphere I had already. No luck, the faceted surfaces distorted the image. I tried various ways to get the sphere into a mesh I could work with, but couldn't figure it out. I sat and appreciated the first globe-like model I had for a moment before deciding to revisit my original plan.
At this point it was Monday night, the night before this post was due, and I still had no model and no paper form. My questions in online forums had gathered a few quick responses, so I began to go through the suggestions. My solution ended up being ApplyCrv to get the map onto my cylinder!
Finally! I had my map on my cylinder. Now all I have to do is project it onto a sphere! Easy, right? Wrong. Uh oh.
Turns out, you can't project inwards along the normal of the cylinder. I tried every command I could find that moved curves in some way - Project, Pull, and even Offset commands. I was so frustrated at this point, I didn't even grab a screenshot of any of my many failures before deleting the file entirely.
Then I remembered that map I had found in the Rhino files. It wasn't a vector, but it DID apply nicely to a sphere to make a perfect globe. It appeared to be somewhere in between the Mercator Projection and the Cylindrical Equal Area Projection in distortion, but didn't match any maps I could find online. I decided to make it into a vector myself and see what I could do with it. I opened it in Illustrator and used image trace to make a simplified map vector out of it.
Going back into Rhino, I took this vector and tried it with FlowAlongSrf. It took some tweaking, but finally I had a sphere with A MAP ON IT!!
Back in my cylinder experiments, I discovered a few nifty commands that I thought I could use to put this map onto a mesh sphere I can unfold. I went ahead and started to experiment. I ended up getting my map onto the mesh sphere by using the command Pull. It transferred each curve to the nearest surface, which happened to be my mesh sphere.
I only had a moment to celebrate because then I realized I had no idea how I was going to actually flatten this out with all the curves staying where they are on the surfaces.
I considered another option instead - what if I just flatten these curves out, cut them out separately out of a different color of paper, and simply glue them to my globe after? That would mean that I wouldn't have to flatten the curves with the globe, but simply flatten them and print them out separately - assuming that their scale and shape would still be correct. Then, I could use the seams of the papercraft to approximate the location of each land mass when I'm assembling. Could that work?
This thought took me down a long and frustrating path of just not being able to figure it out. At all. I first tried the Trim tool, but for some reason it would delete all of my major land masses and leave me with only smaller islands. I tried the Split tool, but it ended up roughly the same. Finally, I landed at the SplitFace tool.
The first time I ran SplitFace, it nearly crashed my computer and left me with a huge garbled mess. It was at this point I decided I needed to simplify my map further and get rid of all the little islands - there's just no way I'm going to get those cut out of paper anyway, I figured.
I went through my now-simplified map and manually used SplitFace to "cut" the countries from the polysurface sphere. I then exploded the resulting polysurfaces and deleted the surfaces I didn't need.
Having done this manually, I knew I could unfold these surfaces into flat templates to cut out. Then all I had to do is glue them onto my sphere! Success!
I had already made some paper templates for this sphere earlier, with 18 divisions in each direction to make lining up with latitude and longitude lines easy. I separated it into individual strips with both the top and bottom separated in order to make it fit on small sheets of printer paper.
At this point however, I felt that this project and I needed a little bit of a break from each other. It was late Monday night, my chronic pain was flaring, and my countries were still far from a printable template. I felt accomplished by how much I had solved, while also feeling distraught about how much there was still left to do. I figured I'd leave that for tomorrow's Dorothy to figure out, and called it a night.
.....And that's the story of how I didn't get my homework done on time.
I decided to go with my idea of making a paper globe with stand, and putting a light inside so I could poke holes into all of the places I've been. I thought it would be a neat little multidisciplinary project that I could keep as a sculpture in my house.
Almost as soon as I had started, I knew this was not going to be as easy as I thought.
Making a paper sphere? That's easy. Designing a stand for it? Done. Putting the countries in their correct places with correct scale? Houston, we have a problem.
In class last week, I told Bryan about my dilemma. I just couldn't figure out how to get these countries in their places! He suggested that I attempt to reverse the Mercator Projection process by wrapping a map onto a cylinder, then projecting it onto a sphere. Genius!
So off I went to put a map onto a cylinder, expecting the task to take me a few hours of research at most. Within a day of beginning, I was frantically emailing Bryan and posting in multiple online forums. Houston, we STILL have a problem.
My process began as follows:
1. Find a vector map of the world under a creative commons license. I ended up using this one from Wikimedia for my first attempts, and later used this Cylindrical Equal Area Projection after realizing the distortion on the Mercator was incorrect.
2. Clean it up and import it to Rhino. Easy.
3. Create a cylinder and then unwrap it with UnrollSrf to get a planar rectangle of the same size and shape of the side of the cylinder.
4. Scale the map to the rectangular plane I just made.
5. Use FlowAlongSrf to put the map onto the side of the cylinder.
6. Repeat this process in as many different ways as I could think of and making slight adjustments each time, because FlowAlongSrf just would not work. Cue frustrated screams into a pillow.
No matter what tweaks I made to my process, FlowAlongSrf would only leave me with a vertical planar copy of my original curves. I tried using UnrollSrfUV instead of UnrollSrf, I tried doing it one half at a time, I even tried using simple curves to see if that would work. Nothing worked.
At this point, I started reaching out to the internet for help. First to Bryan, then to the official Rhino forums. Getting no response from either, I began to brainstorm alternate options.
I considered simply using the flat pattern of the sphere and distorting the map onto it, but I got stuck when trying to figure out how much to distort each area by. Using the Cylindrical Equal Area Projection would squish everything up towards the poles, where the Mercator Projection would still cause a distorted and incorrect map. I was stumped.
I noticed that in the Rhino files, there are two files of a world map - day and night. I made a sphere and applied one as a material map - aha! A perfect globe. Now, can I find a way to make a papercraft out of this?
First, I tried to simply put this pattern onto a mesh sphere instead of the perfectly rounded sphere I had already. No luck, the faceted surfaces distorted the image. I tried various ways to get the sphere into a mesh I could work with, but couldn't figure it out. I sat and appreciated the first globe-like model I had for a moment before deciding to revisit my original plan.
At this point it was Monday night, the night before this post was due, and I still had no model and no paper form. My questions in online forums had gathered a few quick responses, so I began to go through the suggestions. My solution ended up being ApplyCrv to get the map onto my cylinder!
Finally! I had my map on my cylinder. Now all I have to do is project it onto a sphere! Easy, right? Wrong. Uh oh.
Turns out, you can't project inwards along the normal of the cylinder. I tried every command I could find that moved curves in some way - Project, Pull, and even Offset commands. I was so frustrated at this point, I didn't even grab a screenshot of any of my many failures before deleting the file entirely.
Then I remembered that map I had found in the Rhino files. It wasn't a vector, but it DID apply nicely to a sphere to make a perfect globe. It appeared to be somewhere in between the Mercator Projection and the Cylindrical Equal Area Projection in distortion, but didn't match any maps I could find online. I decided to make it into a vector myself and see what I could do with it. I opened it in Illustrator and used image trace to make a simplified map vector out of it.
Back in my cylinder experiments, I discovered a few nifty commands that I thought I could use to put this map onto a mesh sphere I can unfold. I went ahead and started to experiment. I ended up getting my map onto the mesh sphere by using the command Pull. It transferred each curve to the nearest surface, which happened to be my mesh sphere.
I only had a moment to celebrate because then I realized I had no idea how I was going to actually flatten this out with all the curves staying where they are on the surfaces.
I considered another option instead - what if I just flatten these curves out, cut them out separately out of a different color of paper, and simply glue them to my globe after? That would mean that I wouldn't have to flatten the curves with the globe, but simply flatten them and print them out separately - assuming that their scale and shape would still be correct. Then, I could use the seams of the papercraft to approximate the location of each land mass when I'm assembling. Could that work?
This thought took me down a long and frustrating path of just not being able to figure it out. At all. I first tried the Trim tool, but for some reason it would delete all of my major land masses and leave me with only smaller islands. I tried the Split tool, but it ended up roughly the same. Finally, I landed at the SplitFace tool.
The first time I ran SplitFace, it nearly crashed my computer and left me with a huge garbled mess. It was at this point I decided I needed to simplify my map further and get rid of all the little islands - there's just no way I'm going to get those cut out of paper anyway, I figured.
I went through my now-simplified map and manually used SplitFace to "cut" the countries from the polysurface sphere. I then exploded the resulting polysurfaces and deleted the surfaces I didn't need.
Having done this manually, I knew I could unfold these surfaces into flat templates to cut out. Then all I had to do is glue them onto my sphere! Success!
I had already made some paper templates for this sphere earlier, with 18 divisions in each direction to make lining up with latitude and longitude lines easy. I separated it into individual strips with both the top and bottom separated in order to make it fit on small sheets of printer paper.
At this point however, I felt that this project and I needed a little bit of a break from each other. It was late Monday night, my chronic pain was flaring, and my countries were still far from a printable template. I felt accomplished by how much I had solved, while also feeling distraught about how much there was still left to do. I figured I'd leave that for tomorrow's Dorothy to figure out, and called it a night.
.....And that's the story of how I didn't get my homework done on time.