First Map Progress: Westrea

[Gidde]

Great! I've moved the thread to the WIP thread for World/Regional mapping, as this is in fact a work in progress.

[Hai-Etlik]

The main things are:

* the amount of area covered boy mountains is too high
* the overall arrangement of the mountains is a "spine" winding along the landmass rather than boundaries between regions
* at a continental scale significant mountainous regions are going to be much more a complex composite structure made up of blocks, branches, and parallel subchains rather than just one long chain.
* your coastline is too consistent in appearance. You should try to vary the fractal dimension of it a bit more. Include some significant "boring" and less-crinkley sections to provide contrast with the more complex sections. This helps give a better sense of a diversity of geological processes being at play. Varying the anisotropy of the crinkle (Vary how directional it is and what that direction is) and otherwise varying it's nature besides simply amplitude in ways can help as well. You do have some of this, and it helps make it believable as an island, but to make it look more like a continent, I think you need to make more of the coastline smoother in order to provide greater contrast.

The revisions are certainly improving.

[Rickon]

Great! I've moved the thread to the WIP thread for World/Regional mapping, as this is in fact a work in progress.

Is there some way to change the title as it's a bit misleading? Otherwise should I just create a whole new thread?

[Gamerprinter]

Just ask a CL to change the title, I've done it, and the CL's take care of me, I'm sure they do the same for you.

[Rickon]

* the amount of area covered boy mountains is too high

Alright, should I decrease size or amount of mountains? - Not sure entirely what's wrong here.

* the overall arrangement of the mountains is a "spine" winding along the landmass rather than boundaries between regions.
* at a continental scale significant mountainous regions are going to be much more a complex composite structure made up of blocks, branches, and parallel subchains rather than just one long chain.

You mean plate tectonics? I had drawn up some approximates earlier but forgot them wholly before starting to draw the mountains :c Will upload the map with tectonic plates and you can have a look.

* your coastline is too consistent in appearance. You should try to vary the fractal dimension of it a bit more. Include some significant "boring" and less-crinkley sections to provide contrast with the more complex sections. This helps give a better sense of a diversity of geological processes being at play. Varying the anisotropy of the crinkle (Vary how directional it is and what that direction is) and otherwise varying it's nature besides simply amplitude in ways can help as well. You do have some of this, and it helps make it believable as an island, but to make it look more like a continent, I think you need to make more of the coastline smoother in order to provide greater contrast.

Yeah went a little berzerk on the fractal-ness, will redraw the coastlines soon as well.

[Charerg]

If you want to do the tectonic plates "accurately", it's probably necessary to do it on a global scale. That, and you need to determine which way the plates are moving, and the type of boundary (subduction zone, convergent boundary, rift or transform fault), see wikipedia for plate tectonics to find out what these mean. Otherwise it's not really possible to judge whether the tectonics are accurate. Ofc you could also choose to ignore the tectonics if you want.

[Rickon]

*shrugs* Well, ignorance is bliss, eh?... *weeps while re-reading the entire plate tectonics page for the third time again*

[Rickon]

Topographic Worldmap continental drift.png

Guess that's approx how they moved, I'm not any good with this continetial drift & plate tectonics though.

[Falconius]

I still don't have a handle on the scale of this map. So it gets hard to tell what size things should be, for instance with the plates I see them as either rather small plates or this as a rather large continent. Do you have any estimation on the size this continent is? It really renders a lot of criticism moot unless we know what there actually is there because it means people are going off of assumptions that could prove untrue.

[Rickon]

Thought I had written it when I made the post, apparently I only wrote climate. It's around the size of Europe, perhaps a little bigger.