Natural Projection Designer

Sculpt landmasses · Assemble your map

Sculptor

Preparing map…

Display

Show target latitudeShow target longitudeShow warped latitudeShow warped longitudeShow bordersShow land tilesShow vertex forcesShow ocean tilesShow longitude forcesShow island tilesShow area errorShow shape error

Land mask

Shrinks: 0

Warp

Forward steps: 0

busy

Vectors update automatically after each Forward step

Tile shape

Tile side forceTile inner line forcesStrength

Preparing movement vectors…

Polynomial warping

Tile shape weightLand tile weightOcean/island tile weight

Preparing polynomial…

Relative weights for tile sides and interior lines. Zero removes that category’s contribution. Shared sides average their tiles’ weights. Island detection in Settings defines the categories. Population voting optionally adds vertex weighting.

Population voting

Enable

StrengthPopulation radius (mi)Population floor

Preparing population votes…

Effective people = max(radius count, floor)
Weight = strength × ln(1 + effective people) / ln(1 + 1,000,000)
Votes pull toward original latitude and movable longitude targets.

GHSL 2020 · 0.1° grid (~7 mi N–S).

Longitude migration

Enable

Strength

10° source intervals · Targets move with Forward

Latitude migration

Enable

Strength

latitude lines are fixed

Drag to pan · Wheel to zoom · Enter or leave a field to apply · Shrink: 1 raster pixel · Select land restores each shrink · Raster changes restart the mask

Settings

Warping methodMode

Latitude polynomial orderLongitude polynomial orderHorizontal symmetryVertical symmetry

Polynomial orderHorizontal symmetryVertical symmetry

Line polynomial orderHorizontal symmetryVertical symmetryFlatness weight

Favors vertical meridians and horizontal parallels by penalizing their transverse slopes. Whole lines can still shift. Default: 1; 0 disables this cost. Changes update forces without resetting.

Endpoint slope limit (°)Endpoint slope weight

H3 level

Improvement threshold

Minimum decrease in weighted cost per step. Default: 1e-16. Lower values allow smaller improvements; 0 accepts any representable decrease. Changes apply immediately without resetting the warp.

Jacobian determinant threshold

2D polynomial and Poly mesh: minimum allowed sampled Jacobian, including oceans. Default: 0.015. Lower values allow more compression; negative values allow local inversions. The outer-boundary crossing check still applies. Changes apply without resetting the warp.

Polynomial orders: 1–20.

Island detectionMinimum landmass area (sq mi)

Connected original coastline polygons form a landmass, with touching country polygons joined across borders. Components below this area are islands. Narrow sea channels remain separate even when the display raster cannot resolve them. A tile touching a qualifying landmass is land; otherwise it is island if it touches any land pixels, or ocean. H3 warping ignores island/ocean tile shapes. Polynomial methods use the ocean/island tile weight for these tiles. Set 0 to treat all land as landmass. Connectivity and area use original vector geometry; tile overlap uses the raster. Classification stays fixed during warping.

Force displayLongitude arrow magnification

Arrows show each longitude line’s accepted next-step movement, magnified for visibility. Vertex arrows show only tile-shape and population forces.

Raster

Pixels / degreeThreshold

Latitude cutoffs

Northern (°)Southern (°)

Enable land mask selection

When off, the sculptor starts directly with all land. Changing this setting restarts the sculptor, preserving pan and zoom.