[WIP] Nalia 2.0

[birbs]

So it's been a while. I have a blog now, and that's where I've been posting most of my stuff, but I also haven't done a lot of mapping lately anyway.

This is technically the same world as my previous thread but I've made some significant changes, going much harder on the fantasy. The word "Nalia" has now expanded to refer to the whole star system that the main world is a part of, and said world is now a moon called Yannálen orbiting around a giant planet (not a gas giant). There are two other habitable moons, and humans have also made colonies in other various planets nearby. Now don't hear "space travel" and think sci-fi, this is most definitely fantasy (I have a series of blog posts planned for the future which will describe this).

Anyway, the three moons are sort of the "hub" of humanity, the original source and still where most of the population is. They have very unusual geographies, each moon mimics the appearance of a particular spiritual/philosophical symbol important to the worldbuilding. The moons are tidally locked to the planet, so the symbol is constantly facing it.

symbols.png

Yannálen's appearance is based on the spiral symbol. Here's my first rough draft:

Equirectangular:
yannálen.png

Global:
screenshot1.pngscreenshot2.png

Pure white = water, but other than that lighter = higher. I'm fairly happy with it overall, but I kinda feel like it's a bit...empty. There ocean is literally completely empty, and it looks kind of weird to have so much blank space but I've got no idea what I could fill it with. Something underwater maybe? /shrug
I plan on going into super high detail with it, though it will likely be harder because of the unusual terrain (though that also means I can get away with more handwaving).

I haven't posted an up-to-date map on my blog yet because I kinda wanted some feedback here first.

[birbs]

Here are the other two moons, Mödösen:
mödösen.png

And Dahelen:
dahelen.png

The three together:
screenshot4.png

So now I plan on going through and completing them with super realistic terrain using Earth DEM data. It'll be an interesting challenge trying to fit it to the unusual topography but hopefully it will go well.
I also plan on doing the planet that they orbit, which looks like this so far:
screenshot3.png

Still not sure what to do about the giant empty oceans.

[morne]

This is such a unique project! I have to say, I am a little disappointed that you abandoned Nalia 1.0. I was really looking forward to seeing how your Houdini experiments turned out.

That being said, these new designs are really cool and different, which is awesome. I would love to see you plug your rough draft heightmaps into the displacement in Blender to see what they actually look like in relief.