Hey I’ve been working on a 2D RTS game, and I want to have a map of the world with each country’s borders showing. I have decided to go about doing this by inserting a picture of a map into blender, then tracing it, extruding it to make it 3D, then importing each individual territory into roblox studio. The way the player’s camera is positioned in the game still makes these 3D parts look 2D.
This is very time consuming, and considering that I would have to do this for over 200 countries, I just want to know if there’s a better way. I tried using vector drawings and importing those into blender, but they didn’t seem to work.
Another problem is that some of the countries are extremely small, so if I try and scale the image in blender up, those small countries just become extremely pixelated, and I can no longer see their borders.
If anyone has suggestions on how to create an accurate world map, that would be much appreciated.
There are multiple ways of going about this depending on the level of detail you are attempting to achieve.
I think the easiest way you could go about this would be to make a decal then add it to a sphere part, you can see an example of this in Rise of Nations.
Are you trying to make a 3D topographical map or simply a 2D map with borders?
Hey sorry for the the late reply. I mainly want just a 2D map with borders, however I don’t think slapping a decal onto a sphere would work because I don’t really want the map to be like a 3D world, but more of a piece of paper?
If there is a way where I could individually select each country however, I would be open to the 3D Earth kind of map as well. Not looking for a 3D topographical map though.
From there on you can select all the countries at once and export the selection as FBX. Import this FBX file into Roblox, and it should import all the separate objects each as their own objects.
Make sure to check the licenses on the SVG maps you use. The SVG I attached has a Attribution 4.0 International license, so if you use it you have to state that you got it from their website.
Hey thanks for your reply. I had tried using SVGs before, but they were really hard for me to work with because I couldn’t select a territory, just a curve. I’ll use the one you provided in your example since the ones I tried using before were from like 2009-2010, so hopefully a more modern one will work.
I’m in classes right now, so when I get home I’ll test your solution. Thanks!
This worked like a charm! I think the other svg I was using must’ve been old or something because I followed the exact same steps for this one that I did for the old one, and this time it worked flawlessly. Thank you for your help!
Hey I am a little late but did you manage to import this entire SVG into Roblox?
Canada alone already has to many triangles for a Meshpart, I have never used Blender soI am kind of helpless
Hello! Yes I was able to import the SVG provided by the solution above. A few of the countries (like Canada) were just over the 10k triangle limit, so what I did was I selected the country that needed triangles to be reduced, tabbed into edit mode, then pressed A to select everything, then went into the top left and selected Mesh and clicked Merge (or something like that I’ll have to check). After that it cleaned up a lot of the geometry with little to no loss of quality.
The only problem with the svg provided was that for some reason India was really bugged for me, so I was not able to import India and had to find another one I could use.
Hopefully it helped. You can DM me if you have more questions because I don’t wanna clutter this post.
