Gigantica -- A Study in Maximum Habitable Planet Size

[Turambar]

Thanks Turambar! To create my Photoshop brush, I simply drew a radially symmetric mountain in Wilbur at low resolution and eroded slopes into it using several iterations of Incise Flow and Precipitation. I then imported it as a brush into Photoshop.

Great idea. I may have to try that out.

[Peter Toth]

Hello Guild,

Here is my latest progress with "Grandissimo." I've reworked the topography and the coastlines, using an even newer algorithm (I admit suffering severe OCD); I hope it's still looking realistic.

Palmer Done.png

Here is a globe view:

Palmer Done Globe3.png

Planet diameter is 14,718 km, so this is actually a huge continent. I still have the ice caps, calculated by ExoPlaSim, to include in the northern region of the map. That will have to wait till next time, as my eyes are extremely sore.

Please let me know what you think.

Peter

[Turambar]

Hello Guild,

Here is my latest progress with "Grandissimo." I've reworked the topography and the coastlines, using an even newer algorithm (I admit suffering severe OCD); I hope it's still looking realistic.

Palmer Done.png

Here is a globe view:

Palmer Done Globe3.png

Planet diameter is 14,718 km, so this is actually a huge continent. I still have the ice caps, calculated by ExoPlaSim, to include in the northern region of the map. That will have to wait till next time, as my eyes are extremely sore.

Please let me know what you think.

Peter

The continent looks fantastic. My only comment is on the edge of the other continent in the lower left corner: the edges of the elevation look a bit too even.

[QED42]

Really impressive how far your process has come, these are some excellent results.

[Peter Toth]

Thanks Turambar and QED42 for the positive words!

Regarding the other continent in the lower left corner, I'll clean up the topography/bathymetry later. For now I've simply faded the peripheral continents to focus on the central one.

Here's my latest progress, including the ice cap that was calculated by ExoPlaSim. As you may notice, it has some topography that pertains to the thickness of the ice during the summer season, when the ice shelf thickness is at its minimum. Darkest blue corresponds to a thickness of 3.9 meters; white, negligible thickness. Does anyone have any ideas as to how I might make the ice cap more "realistic?"

With Glacier.png

And here is map showing the direction of the summer winds, also based on ExoPlaSim data:

Summer Winds 2.png

Hope you all enjoy!

Peter

[MrBragg]

For the ice cap, assuming your goal is to show only permanent ice cover, IMO it would be nice if it blended in with the terrain a bit on its edges. What I mean by this is near the margin--and possibly some ways into the interior, depending on the height of your mountains--your topography will "poke out" of the ice cap, a la nunataks, and so that could be a cool effect to try to capture on your map. I also think your units are a bit off since ~4 m is not very thick for the thickest part of a permanent ice cap

[Peter Toth]

Hi MrBragg,

Thank you for your feedback. I've checked the ExoPlaSim data repeatedly and cannot see any error in its calculation of the 4-metre thick ice cap. I'm wondering if perhaps the thicker atmosphere--at 1.324 atmospheres--allows for more efficient heat transfer to the poles, making the poles warmer, despite the faster rotation which would tend to counter that effect.

Because it's relatively thin, I've chosen to depict the ice cap only over the oceans, where the surface should be whitecapped in contrast to the dark oceans. In the land locations, it should not affect the topography at all.

I've reworked the topography (my OCD strikes again, lol), ensuring not to "carve out" my mountains in the desert regions. Using this raw data, I've generated a satellite image of this continent using Arsheesh's tutorial, with clouds:

New With Clouds.png

...and without clouds:

New Without Clouds.png

By the way, here is the Koppen diagram that helped me shape topography and route rivers:

Koppen.png

Please let me know what you think.

Peter

[Turambar]

Hi MrBragg,

Thank you for your feedback. I've checked the ExoPlaSim data repeatedly and cannot see any error in its calculation of the 4-metre thick ice cap. I'm wondering if perhaps the thicker atmosphere--at 1.324 atmospheres--allows for more efficient heat transfer to the poles, making the poles warmer, despite the faster rotation which would tend to counter that effect.

Because it's relatively thin, I've chosen to depict the ice cap only over the oceans, where the surface should be whitecapped in contrast to the dark oceans. In the land locations, it should not affect the topography at all.

I've reworked the topography (my OCD strikes again, lol), ensuring not to "carve out" my mountains in the desert regions. Using this raw data, I've generated a satellite image of this continent using Arsheesh's tutorial, with clouds:

New With Clouds.png

...and without clouds:

New Without Clouds.png

By the way, here is the Koppen diagram that helped me shape topography and route rivers:

Koppen.png

Please let me know what you think.

Peter

Beautiful! I really appreciate your extreme attention to detail and realism. I especially like that satellite version with clouds, which feels like I'm looking out of the window of an orbiting space station.

My only comment would be on the texturing, which is especially noticeable in the non-cloud version where the colors seem a bit flat. This is a challenge with this kind of map, but I think you can fix it, perhaps by adding some varying land textures in various modes and opacities (e.g. overlay/screen/liner burn). One way I have found to make nice realistic textures, would be to import your heightmap in Gaea and use some of the LookDev nodes to generate a variety of texture masks for different biomes. You can adjust them in an almost infinite number of ways, until you get the right look. Just one idea.

[Peter Toth]

Thank you Turambar, for your positive words and critique!

I'll definitely have to experiment more with Gaea to see what possibilities exist for the colouring/shading of this world's topography.

Today I've completed the fourth continent, Larson, taking into account the effects of biomes on topography and river flow.

Here is the Koppen map showing climates that I used as a reference:

Larson3.png

From the Koppen map I was able to generate the following texture map:

Larson1.png

...and this one with altitudes stroked:

Larson2.png

One question, however: how do you experts re-project your maps without losing detail? I've tried to show continent 3, Horace, on the updates above but lost significant detail when I rotated the globe on Photoshop. This happened even though the image had an original resolution of 12,000 x 6,000 pixels. (If the file had been larger, my computer would have crashed.)

Could anyone offer some guidance, please? Are there other options besides the 3D globe feature on Photoshop?

Peter

[worldbuilding pasta]

Reprojection pretty much always comes with a cost to detail on raster images. Best I can say is to retain as high a resolution as you can and minimize reprojection steps; rather than reprojecting one map continuously to each area of detail, project one map out to every detail area, then reproject all those back to the original projection and stitch them back together.