Celestia Forums

The background of this is unimportant, but years ago I created a map on paper, and am wondering if there is any easy way to get this as a viable texture to wrap around a planet. I'm afraid I may need to do this in photoshop; draw it from scratch. Any pointers on how to make sure the texture comes out right?

I'm right aren't I?

There are several ways to get a physical map into a computer, a digital camera or a scanner probably would be the most convenient.
Once you've got it in the form of a digital image, there are photoshop plugins (which work with other paint programs, too) as well as several standalone utilities that can be used to change the projection used on a picture of a map from one type (e.g. Mercator) to another (e.g. "simple cylindrical"-- which is what Celestia uses).

Two popular remapping utilities are
IRIS, by Christian Buil:
http://astrosurf.com/buil/us/iris/iris.htm
and
MMPS: Matthew's Map Projection Software:
http://www.users.globalnet.co.uk/~arcus/mmps/mmps.html
by Matthew Acrus

Maybe I needed to be more clear, the map itself, its in plain graphite pencil. No colors, no features beyond continents and islands drawn in simple lines

That's a place to start!

You can transform the drawing into maps of
1. the oceans and
2. specular reflections
by filling in appropriate areas with a solid color.

One of those images also can be used as a mask to cut out the land areas from pictures of naturally fractal objects, like rocks.