[WIP] Building a world from tectonics onward

[MrBragg]

Thanks for the kind words! A lot of how I figured things out was detailed on this thread, but I can certainly answer your specific questions here.

How do you know the scale for your mountains and valleys ?

This was basically from looking at maps of earth and figuring out how big various geologic features tended to be. So, if I wanted an old, eroded mountain range I'd look at the Appalachians and Urals and figure out the typical height, width, and length of that kind of mountain chain. It was super helpful to have a map of earth at the exact same scale as the maps I was making so I could quickly see if the scale felt about right.

How do you deal with Polar distortion ?

For this I started with a rough orientation of continents built entirely in equirectangular projection. For landmasses within 30 N/S I did all work in equirectangular since the distortion in that range was pretty minimal. Outside of 30 N/S I would reproject the map into (typically) oblique equirectangular to ~ center the landmass and then work in that projection to develop the "canonical" maps before reprojecting back to equirectangular to stitch everything together.

And did you draw everything by hand or did you use Wilburg ? If yes what Wilbur settings ?

The coastlines and topography were done by hand in Gimp using a variety of different brushes. I then would process that starting heightmap in Wilbur to get the nice high frequency details. I'm pretty sure my Wilbur process is on this thread somewhere, but if you can't find it let me know and I can try to dig it up for you.