Fantasy Maps to Planets

For those that have created fantasy maps using previous posts here, in classes, or elsewhere in Worldbuilding,  D&D, or art, I created a small script to see your maps as spherical planets. You can click to rotate and move the mouse off the canvas to have rotation. You may want to draw a map that will project without a seam (think about how fabric patterns tessellate).

You can load your own image and change the path to see your own creation. Below is Codepen, and p5.js code is here. I used the 3d examples on the p5.js website to create this.

Note that this is a simple sphere and not an ellipsoid or WGS-84 model, and does not account for precession, nutation, and many other important concepts. However, this can start some conversations on those matters including what projection really is. I thought of adding a moon or satellites and started thinking of ECI/ECEF reference frames in p5js and decided that it would be for another day.

I had been meaning to do this one for awhile. For this week, I have an hour of code group that I plan to map cat faces for fun to the sphere and a worldbuilding group that is a bit more serious with questions like, “What does the inside of a Dyson sphere look like?”