Aerth
First off, prior to starting work on this map I had no experience in cartography whatsoever.
As I stated in my introduction, I want to make a world for an upcoming original story.
Following my search for an automated method, I found this planet generator.
The setup is fairly easy: you pick a seed, a color scheme, and a projection; the program then renders the planet the same size you chose.
The colors are height dependent, having two gradients (one for sea, one for land).
There are a few more parameters, but that's not relevant for this thread.
The offline (command line) version has even more parameters. I've experimented with this program for well over 3 weeks before getting something I could work with.
At this point, I should probably note what size I've been working with.
The idea was to have a printable A0 sized map. According to the math that's:
The paper: 118,9 x 84,1 cm @ 300 DPI
The image: 14043 x 9933 pixels
The original plan was to use the program to generate something that could be used as a guideline for a finalized version. As time passed and hours were spent drawing the basic coastline by hand, I realized that the amount of work was simply too much for me to enjoy it. Largely because progress was extremely slow and I wasn't making anything I could be happy with.
So I started a search for cartography tutorials and found this tutorial by Tear.
Now at least I had something to help me make what I could be happy with.
I've been using Photoshop for roughly 15 years now and can say I could easily follow the tutorial (even though it has some inconsistencies).
Those who have tried to create something using this tutorial know there's quite a bit of manual work involved.
Here's where my method slightly deviates from the tutorial:
Every alpha mask basically is a grayscale. The map that I had generated can be split into a sea-map and a land-map, then converted to a grayscale map, which can then be used as an alpha mask.
I've written the details in a tutorial of my own (of course, heavily based on Tear's).
The process of converting and realistically using the generated data for the map took another month or two.
I've rebuilt the map at least thrice by this point; the final time to proof-test my own tutorial to check that I didn't miss any steps, methods or other information.
The PSD had to be split in two (sea and land) in order to be relatively fast to process (the current versions are 2,5GB and 3,2GB) and eat away at least 6GB of RAM.
You can imagine that even running a fast function like 'expand selection by 150px' on the full land-mass can take a good 40 seconds.
So with the map now finally created, there was still something that had to be created: rivers... the one thing I could not generate automatically.
At this point, there were two choices:
- hand-draw the rivers like the tutorial says
- create a program that uses the height map to flow a river downhill (spawn points are manual)
I decided the latter.
Using the same program I used to generate my world map, I created a integer based height matrix. It's basically a giant matrix where each number indicates the height of that pixel.
The resulting program unfortunately enjoys the fairly fluctuating height map around the higher hills and mountains, drawing nearly single pixel rivers, but severely suffers from the flat plains that eventually follow. This results in more lakes than rivers.
A little bit of insight on the general scale of things:
As I used a program to generate a map, I know the exact size in degrees.
The large chunk of the world I use, is 4600px for 30 degrees. To keep things mathematically simple, I decided to make 1 degree equal to 100km. This makes the whole planet (360*100km) 36000km in circumference, just slightly more than 10% smaller than our Earth (roughly 40000km in circumference).
Going back to 30deg = 4600px, 1 degree would be (4600/30) 153,33px. This in turn makes each pixel (30*100km / 4600px ) a rough 652 meters.
Having traveled enough around Europe and Scandinavia, I know no rivers that actually span that wide, so having a river wider than 1px would be undesirable.
TLR
Without further ado, I present you the result:
Aerth
Do not worry about having to load the full 14043x9933 image. As a programmer and website builder, I've run a program that has split the giant image (275MB) into nearly 3475 pieces of 194x194 pixels each.
As for why the 'WIP' tag:
- Not a single region, country, river, city (etc), ocean, sea label
- No country borders
- No rivers
- Only rough estimates of biomes
The two attached images are what the original render was (generated) and what I made of it using the Saderan tutorial by Tear. They are only a part of the full scale, but show what I started with and what the result is.
I'd love to hear your comments on what I've created, including the things that don't make any sense (such as the size, location and border of the large desert).
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