Frodo -- A Topography Test

[Peter Toth]

Hello Guild,

I'm busy with a conworld project similar to the one used by Hal Clement in "Mission of Gravity." Similar to the novel, I've designed a planet that rotates four times faster than the earth, using Worldbuilding Pasta's helpful instructions to work out climates and biomes. Of course, before tackling the topography of this project, I had to make sure my terrain rendering skills were acceptable. Thus, I've posted the following map with a question: Could you let me know how "realistic" you consider this topography? Is there anything you could suggest to improve my realism?

Thank you so much.

Peter


Gravia Main.png
Gravia Main 2.png

[waldronate]

As always, it's hard to make too many judgements without knowing the scale of the map. Is it a ten, hundred, a thousand, or some other number of kilometers across? Different topographic features have different appearances at different scales.
I would guess that you're looking at roughly continental scale on this map (perhaps something like the size of Australia). On this map, the mountain provinces look sort of like blobs and the big splayed river system is very unnatural. I do understand how you got there (noise field followed by sloped basin filling followed by incising the flow pattern on top of that), but it's unnatural looking, even though the river features (usually the hard part) are plausible given the underlying basis. The placement of the lakes feels a little odd as well.
To diverge for a second here, one of the major limitations Wilbur's erosion model (and any strictly flow-based model) is that it assumes that every point on the surface has the same ability to be eroded. That gives you mountains that always look like erosion in granite or mud: you'd need some sort of non-uniform erosion to avoid that sort of thing. Some software models keep track of deposited areas as softer and that gives a somewhat different look. Wilbur's models were "designed" for the simplest things to implement rather than the best results and certainly not for ease of use. It's good at elaborating little details on top of existing data at scales up to a hundred meters or so per pixel, but beyond that things don't quite look right.
Having said all of that, the map looks fine for what it is. You have good mastery of the technical aspects of assembling the results and the final renderings look good. The basic landforms look implausible at large scale (blob mountains and splayed river systems are rather unnatural). One way to avoid that is to rough in the landforms by hand and let the software do the elaboration.