[WIP] Please critique the continental landforms

[gwiley]

For myself, I like the 2nd one better. I do not have a problem with the mountain ranges. Earth plate tectonics would have an ancient continent that splits and wanders. And, of course, they "fit" together. But that is here and elsewhere, perhaps different. I would expect more land mass unless it is more of a water world than Earth.

I like the darker colors and that they are different shades. I did not associate it with elevation. Perhaps because you have only a few variations. I would add more shades as the color scheme suggests every place is almost the same. I would add more mountains but I am a tectonics freak.

Two things bother me:
- the color of the oceans - too uniform even though you have depths well done. Your trenches are almost stand alone - usually I think of them as being close to continents.
- the rivers (does this make me an honorary river police?) - at a continental scale, rivers look more straight - yours are too straight for my taste. again, the uniform color bothers me.

Otherwise, the script you are using makes a very nice map.

Regards,
Gary

[Master TMO]

The nice thing about Fractal Terrains is that I can swap out color palettes with the click of a button. And I have a very bad habit of just swapping around schemes and posting maps here with no explanation of what the colors mean.

The primary goal of the script was to try for a more realistic set of mountain ranges, towards the edges of the landmasses rather than in the center where fractal generators tend to put them. The sea is underplayed because it's completely secondary. I am more concerned with the surface. The trenches were, in fact, a completely accidental side-effect of the script. Also, the rivers are standard Fractal Terrains output to show the slope and direction of the land.

The second color scheme was one that I might use for a finished world, since I had put some work into it just to show what a processed version of the script output might look like. The first and third were primarily to show the elevations.

Thanks for your feedback, I appreciate it! I can very easily get carried away with my own ideas, so I like to let other people fact-check me and bring me back to reality occasionally.

[Robulous]

Well, you have the classic problem of fractal terrains - they don't look like there have been plate tectonics going on. Otherwise they look ok, if'n you're asking me

If you want plate tectonics, though ... different kettle of phish.

I agree about FT and plate tectonics - of course not all worlds would necessarily have tectonics, Venus and Mars don't, but then they're not habitable.

Is there any other software that would help model continental plates? I have an FT world model which I have drawn plates onto, but it would be cool if there's a tool I can use to play around with them.

[Master TMO]

I agree about FT and plate tectonics - of course not all worlds would necessarily have tectonics, Venus and Mars don't, but then they're not habitable.

Is there any other software that would help model continental plates? I have an FT world model which I have drawn plates onto, but it would be cool if there's a tool I can use to play around with them.

None that I am aware of. There have been a few mentions on here of people trying to build tools that start at modelling them, but none have finished that I know of. I have an Excel sheet of my own that tries to divide a sphere up into random plates. It's not very well tested yet, and has been running for the last 24 hours now, trying to output a 4096x2048 image of a world with 17 plates on it. I had the thought the other day of combining that project with this script and seeing what kind of results I got.