Any way to save out the data as a 3d mesh?

[isaacthomasriley]

Hi! I just heard of Tectonics.js. I'm trying to create a visual 3D environment of my world (Just key locations,) for my novel, in Blender. I saved out the simulation file, and the .csv data. Is there a way I can convert the csv data to a 3D mesh so that I can use it in blender? Any help would be appreciated!

[MightyBOBcnc]

-Edit: fixed instructions.

How proficient with Blender are you?

It would be better if we could export straight from tectonics.js to an equirectangular image file or mesh data but in the meantime this workaround will work:

1. View > Texture in the bottom right corner.
2. Resize your browser window so that the viewport is as close to twice as wide as it is tall as you can get.
3. Use the File > Screenshot function of tectonics.js in the bottom right corner controls to take a screenshot of each type of map you want to save (e.g. height map, topographic, etc.)
4. In your image editing software of choice (Gimp, Photoshop, Affinity, etc.) resize the image to be exactly twice as wide as it is tall (e.g. 2048x1024 or something like that) and crop or paint away any black border at the top and bottom of the image, then save that as a texture.
   
5. In Blender create a new NURBS Sphere (not a mesh sphere, the UVs of a poly or icosphere are wrong for this).
6. Apply a new material to the sphere.
7. NURBS spheres have, like, sideways UVs or something weird so in your material network insert a Mapping node and set Rotation Y to 180, Rotation Z to 90, Scale X to -1 and Scale Y to -1 to wrangle the texture into the proper orientation on the sphere.
   

-Edit 2: It has come to my attention that Blender has faulty NURBS generation algorithms. Here is a top-down view; on the left is a UV sphere, on the right is a NURBS sphere. You can see that the distribution of edges on the NURBS sphere is uneven, and no matter how many spans you add to the Resolution U it will always be wrong. This creates longitudinal distortion when the texture is applied to the NURBs sphere.

The fastest Blender-only solution would be to disregard what I said in step 5 and just use a UV sphere and live with the consequences of the triangles being weird at the poles. You could mitigate this by adding a lot of Segments and Rings when you create the UV sphere so that the triangles are small and ignorable.

You could also spend a lot of time fixing the UVs for a UV sphere with a tiny bevel on the vertex at the north and south pole. This would turn each of the triangles into a quad, and then in the UV editor you'd straighten the edges so that everything is a proper grid.

Or you could take a NURBS sphere and convert it into a mesh, and then try to fix the mesh so that the edges are properly distributed and the UVs are correct. Either of these solutions would be very tedious and labor intensive.

Or you could find a way to get a proper NURBS sphere from a different program. Autodesk Maya generates correct NURBS spheres and you could convert that to a mesh and export to Blender as an OBJ. Other 3D software may also have correct NURBS spheres (and without the price tag of Maya.)