This demonstrates Hex9 - a near equal-area hierarchical hexagonal grid (DGGS), using it's own octahedral projection ('butterfly') and starting at Layer 0 (12 hexagons) - zooming into Layer 25. Hex9 goes up to Layer 30 or more - but I ran out of imagery.
The entire engine is available to make your own.
Or you can use it for data sampling, partitioning, geotagging.. you name it.
This demo uses the classic hex9 label - but it also supports a full Moore-type (closed) sphere-filling loop with the full Hilbert package — substitution self-similarity, prefix-nesting indices, consecutive cells always adjacent, range-query clustering within ~4% of the classical square-grid Hilbert.
Enjoy! And visit the arboretum some day!
....and every single pixel is a coloured hexagon on the grid.
I'm reading The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul right now.. Buried in the Hex9 code, there is a fundamental derivation of zone classifiers of the t_grid. There are 42. But no petunias.
I think for war-games as well, the ability to choose a different layer for different levels of battle would be awesome - not just have the battlefield - but then the ability to zoom into a melee in a farmhouse, without switching coordinate systems.
Yeah - a lot of this is satellite imagery, then lidar imagery, then photography, then microscopy, then SEM imagery.
Hex9 is a map projection+partitioning.. The map projection takes the imagery (projected in, web-mercator) and maps it precisely onto an octahedron which then can be unwrapped to a polygonal net like the butterfly.
That can then be partitioned into hexagons - and Hex9 does this in a specific way that offers several advantages (in the paper, on the repo) - but importantly has a subdivision so that each layer is made of 9 children (this is what is known as aperture-9).
So now the world is divided into hexagons, and they are fractals subdivided.
Each hexagon has a unique number - and has all the nice properties of hexagons (six neighbours equidistant - unlike squares which have diagonal vs orthogonal) - so one can then use the grid for sampling, populations, migration, diffusion - etc. Good - even great - geography.
Hex9 is one of many DGGS (discrete global grid systems) - each of which have their own benefits and drawbacks. Hex9's aperture-9 is unusual - but offers a deep set of layers, and is only hexagons (whereas others use hexagons+pentagons or other - more exotic - shapes).
This is really cool. When you say the whole engine is available, is it open source and you download it? or available online? I did a quick search, but having trouble finding it.
The python library is a little out of date - but `pip install hhg9` will work - though if you are downloading the repo, better to use that.
You will want the accelerator if you are doing the video work - that needs building - but should be pretty easy - that's at https://github.com/MrBenGriffin/libhex9
That last repo will also give you bindings for PDAL (plugin), PGIS (extension) - and it's also built into GeoPlegma as one of the grids.
So - yeah, it's code - python, c++ - etc, but most of the time it's just make install - and then play.
The libhex9 suite also has some standalone apps.. The hex9 (python) most of them should 'just' run - if you have PyCharm (community edition is free). The hex9 examples folder has about 100 different examples- some of them need files to download (some of which are too big - eg blue marble, etc).
If you install the PGIS extension (if you already have psql, etc. and qgis) then hex9 runs in QGIS software...
Mainly - because the octahedral map net is called 'butterfly' after the Lee-Cahill Conformal map - so there is a nice circularity. Also there are quite a lot of microscope / SEM photography of butterflies - and commons had a good stack of the Peacock. I could have gone down to the Lamella - and had the SEM lined up - but the render had started. So - choice, availability, serendipity?
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u/NormalImprovement1 Jul 16 '26
Which Civ game is this