Janus, a red, somewhat dry planet (looking for input)

[Simonson]

Hello!

I'm trying to hammer out a map for an ongoing RPG campaign, and any advice or input is welcome!

Here is what is settled about the world:

• It's a habitable but not very fertile world. Mostly desert, hot desert near the equator, cold desert near the poles.
• There are oceans, but they are small and very briney.
• Fresh water exists as oases and rivers.
• Lots of mountains.

Here's where I am at the moment:

• Too murky colors. I've just mapped three gradients, one desert, one arctic, and one for mountains, to the heightmap, but the desert one is too dark, I think.
• Too much river erosion, I think. I did it mostly to get a natural feel to the landscape, using wilbur, with the idea that there was a lot of flow in the planet's geological past, but I think it's too much.
• Need to draw the actual, flowing rivers there!
• Shrink the green around the rivers to make it feel like less area is not desert. And put oases in there.
• Put cities and roads on the map, but I need to be clear on where there is fresh water first.
• The edges of some mountain areas haven't been blurred.

I'm fond of the idea of brine oceans and a lack of rivers, to break up the old pattern of having cities on seashore and rivers, making the world feel different from Earth, but when I'm actually sitting with the map it's sooo hard to get away from that old habit. Or it's just because I havent finished deciding where the big oases are, I suppose.

Anyway, that's where I am at the moment! Super happy for any input!

(Oh, credits! Tutorials I have used to get on the track are: Ascension's atlas style tutorial for gimp and ps, Fun with Wilbur, Eriond by Arsheesh, and others.)

(Also: my first post after years of lurking, yay!)

Janus, map.jpg

[Lingon]

Cool look, I like the color scheme of the land very much, and the concept for the world The oceans look too bright and nice compared to the rest in my opinion, a browner-grayer tone to the blue would make the overall look more harmonious.

[arsheesh]

I agree with Lingon about the ocean color. But you are off to a great start here.

[Simonson]

Thank you guys!

I've redone this a bit, in Wilbur, then Gimp. More happy about some stuff, not sure about other. Rivers look weird where they enter some fjord-like things. Guess I'll raise the land in Wilbur so that the rivers run way out in the oceans, and then use the landmass mask in Gimp to cut them off.

Didn't see your comments until after this evening's session, so I'll look into the ocean color next time! Also if the desert reds became to nice and calm now. Now that I compare them, the old color scheme looks more characterful, if a bit murky.

Rivers are too wide as well. Oh well, back to the drawing board!

Janus 2.jpg

[Simonson]

New version again!

Done some work on the colors, but now I'm really missing the more hostile-looking mountains from the first version. Unfortunately I can't just bring them over, because I'm working in a higher resolution now. Guess I'll have another go in Wilbur...

Janus 2c.jpg

[smiler127]

I really like the coastal lines and textures you're using. Just one thing though, depending on how realistic you want your world to be, I feel like there's no way tectonic plate shifting would create a landmass with so many fractures and not be broken completely apart into many small land masses.

Given how close some of the inlets seas are to each other to my eye it seems you'd have around 3 different land masses here plus additional scattered islands if this continent was the epicentre of where the plates and fault lines met.

[Simonson]

Ooh, thank you for that input (and for pep, I'm pretty pleased with the coastal swirls, myself )! I haven't thought about tectonics at all, actually, guess I need to read up on that a bit!

The idea here is that this is more or less the entire surface of the globe. I did it really sloppily because I needed a rough map for the ongoing game, but my hand-wavey idea is that the regions at the top and bottom of the map are really stretched in the image here (doesn't the mercator projection create a square map?). I'm aware that it would look different if it actually were stretched, but I haven't felt up to starting over that far from scratch to get it right. Yet!

(Obviously there should be polar ice caps covering a large portion at the top and bottom, so maybe I will get away with a bit more than I should there...)

Since I'm new to thinking plate tectonics, do you have any advice on how to approach it? Where are the lines between the three land masses that you see?

I really might start over, getting both the projection and the tectonics right. But then again, I might just call it a learning experience, good enough for the current game, and do it right the next time!

[Simonson]

Something like this is what I imagined...

(Of course, it's done sloppily with the stretching and the ugly ice caps, as a test, but still! )

Janus 2 globes 2.jpg

[smiler127]

Nice! I really like the globes. I'm a complete amateur myself How'd you get them to stretch and curve around a sphere?

When I look at your flat image, I keep seeing the two eastern areas fracturing into separate landmasses in my imagination. Seeing it in a globe fashion however changes the perspective a lot.


As to tectonics it only stood out to me because I've been researching it for my own world building project. here are some links I'd recommend.

http://www.extremescience.com/how-pl...nics-works.htm

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ryrXAGY1dmE

http://worldbuildingschool.com/addin...our-world-map/

[johnvanvliet]

nice except for the polar area ( including 60 to 90 north/south)

it looks to be in Mercator projection 85 north to 85 south
see:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_map_projections
Mercator
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mercator_projection

the image in post 5 remapped to simple cylindrical ( 90 north to 90 south )
-- this projection is used to wrap around a sphere



from this you can using gimp ( polar coordinates plugin) or some other tool

the north and south half of the planet


as you can see the -180 and +180 longitude do not match and do not line up

and the poles need some fixing
( i use the gimp plugin "Resynthesizer" and the built in "heal" tool for fixing things like this



then you get a image that can be displayed on a sphere as in post #8