Planabe: yet another worldbuilding project

[Maravone]

Hello everyone!
Long time lurker, but first time poster here.

So I've had this particular worldbuilding project in the back of my mind for a while now, and a certain current pandemic allowed me to have the needed free time to actually start developing this a bit more indepth besides simple landmass shapes.
Originally a simple regional handrawn map, it evolved into a general idea of a full world... Which then got completely scrapped and redrawn.
The plan so far is to come up with a coherent study of plate tectonics, develop a topography map of the entire thing, likely in the style of Pixie's wonderful atlases, though not as detailed.
Anything beyond this is probably not worth considering right now anyway, but I do hope I can develop an hand-drawn coloured shaded-relief regional map of a particular area of the world I intend to hash out in terms of cultures and history in a more indepth manner. Though thats really speculative and far into the future.

tectonica winkel 3.2 v2.0.png

Current landmass design with a very general idea of tectonic plates and topography.
Yellow arrows point the general movement of plates.

Red: Divergent Boundaries
Green: Transform Boundaries
Purple: Convergent Boundaries


I should first point out that the landmass was first drawn and only after did I try to come up with a vague system of tectonic plates.
Basically, the idea from the start was to come up with a pangaea like world that has begun to break apart, with the exception of an insular smaller continent, which here is the result of a rather violent young continental plate boundary converging with an oceanic plate.
I'm rather uncertain about the validity or believability of any of this, tectonic wise, and that is partially why I'm already posting this here, hoping for some comments on its basic believability and more importantly on the general distribution of mountains and general distribution of elevation. Unlike other projects that I much adore in this website, i dont plan to do a very indepth or realistic study of plate tectonics, being rather content with basic believability and consistency.

However I do intend to do a bit more indepth work on climate, having already started with Azélor's wonderful climate tutorial, having done currents, temperature maps and winds. Currently in the process of doing precipitation, but already considering that some stuff may need correcting...

Temperature map:

temp janeiro.png
January

temp julho.png
July

---

Winds:

winds january-01.png
January

winds july-01.png
July


Anyway, sorry for the long post, any feedback welcome, especially on the feasibility of my current study on plate boundaries.
Hopefully, I'll do an update on this soon, with climates!

[Robulous]

Looks like a great start!

[MrBragg]

Welcome to the COVID-induced newbie club This looks really cool!

I’m certainly no expert, but I’m also going through a bit of a tectonics adventure at the moment, so here are a couple of quick thoughts.

Even though your goal isn’t to do a deep dive into tectonics (smart!), you might benefit from dividing your subduction zones (usually blue) from your convergent continental boundaries. While in most of your cases it’s straightforward enough to see where subduction is happening and in which direction (so you know where to put mountains / island arcs), delineating the coloring will make things clearer to see I think.

As far as boundaries go, for the westernmost continent, you have a convergent-convergent-convergent boundary at about 15 degrees north which doesn’t seem right given the relative motions of the plates involved; e.g. the big oceanic plate and the northern part of the continent look to be moving away from each other, or at the very least sliding past one another.

Similarly, the northeastern margins of the large southern oceanic plate have a lot of transform and even divergent boundaries, while from your arrows it looks like there should be more convergence going on.

Actually, as a general point, have you tried projecting this onto a sphere using something like https://www.maptoglobe.com/? That can help a lot with figuring out what your motions look like in 3D.

[Maravone]

Welcome to the COVID-induced newbie club This looks really cool!

I’m certainly no expert, but I’m also going through a bit of a tectonics adventure at the moment, so here are a couple of quick thoughts.

Even though your goal isn’t to do a deep dive into tectonics (smart!), you might benefit from dividing your subduction zones (usually blue) from your convergent continental boundaries. While in most of your cases it’s straightforward enough to see where subduction is happening and in which direction (so you know where to put mountains / island arcs), delineating the coloring will make things clearer to see I think.

As far as boundaries go, for the westernmost continent, you have a convergent-convergent-convergent boundary at about 15 degrees north which doesn’t seem right given the relative motions of the plates involved; e.g. the big oceanic plate and the northern part of the continent look to be moving away from each other, or at the very least sliding past one another.

Similarly, the northeastern margins of the large southern oceanic plate have a lot of transform and even divergent boundaries, while from your arrows it looks like there should be more convergence going on.

Actually, as a general point, have you tried projecting this onto a sphere using something like https://www.maptoglobe.com/? That can help a lot with figuring out what your motions look like in 3D.

Thanks for the input!
While drawing the landmass, I did had the projection into consideration. It was the usual painful process of drawing in an equirectangular projection and then loading it into g.projector and then correcting, rinse & repeat. Those two westernmost continental plates are diverging from each other, but the southern one is also rotating partially, with the axis of rotation along the western land boundary between the two continents.

Honestly, regarding that whole tectonic plates map, I ended up going back and redrawing the continents partially, as I definitely felt that the eastern set of continents was feeling way too Asianlike. That was partially the objective, but I was feeling it was too blatant. Plus there was that whole dwarf malformed Africa-like continent too, which I wasnt too happy about.

Made it a bit more interesting and decided to take this change and actually work with g.plates and do a projection of continental plate motion into the future. This probably helps to understand what the general motion of this "pangaea breaking apart" concept I had in mind.



Anyway, time to take this animation and make a tectonic boundaries map out of it and iterate the mountain ranges from it now all over again.

[Harrg]

MORE TECTONIC BASED MAPS FOR GOD OF TECTONIC MAPS!
Looks good