Around the beginning of this year I came to CG with a "How Do I" question about conworld building; thanks to CG I determined I wasn't able to help a potential client with his fantasy world. The idea kept nagging at the back of my mind though, so over this past month (September) I spent a bit of free time designing a fictional world for fun. Since CG was so helpful I figured I should say thank you by sharing.

WIP since I'll likely continue expanding on it with other related side projects in my free time. Original idea was to do a series of maps from a variety of time periods; early history, modern history, futuristic, etc. More of a science-fiction than fantasy person myself; so I opted for the common fantasy species but I wanted to roll them back to their mythological concepts instead of their modern, post-Tolkien, high-fantasy versions and rebuild them from the ground up to be more believable as a mental exercise in pseudoscience. Ultimately it's just a skills/tools practice so who knows how far i'll actually get with it.

Initial world was generated in Fractal Terrains, edited & eroded in Wilbur, then the satellite image look was done using GIMP. Cloud cover is an edited version of the Blue Marble public domain imagery. I dropped the whole thing into Blender for fun and made a low-framerate GIF animation. Scaled everything down to reasonable posting size.

Hope you enjoy!

1024x1024.GIF
Blender globe low-frame animation (Pre-history)
2048x1024.jpg
GIMP satellite imagery, no clouds (Pre-history)
2048x742Evo.jpg
Evolutionary ladder of modern species (1990s/Modern Textbook Style)
2048x1024-Mig.jpg
Migration of modern species (1990s/Modern Textbook Style)
2048x1024-Pol.jpg
WIP for what will be political map in (1990s/Modern Textbook Style)