Hello there,
i recently introduced myself in the Member Introductions Forum.
I previewed the creation of a Fantasy World Map there and since it takes me some effort to write readable English, I will just copy and paste a part of the Introduction in here:
I'm pretty new to the topic cartographie, I just came to it while I was creating a fantasy world for memory routes, and improving imagination... the whole venture was so fun, so I started taking things serious.
I wanted to create a world as logic and structured as possible. Of course location is an important part of this, so i decided to draw a little map with an app on my smartphone.
I thought a bit about climate and water currents, and created some layers, it was kind of fun but it turned out to be not detailed enough. It wasn't very pretty too. ^^
So I started creating a Photoshop file with my little map.
While looking up the needed skills for Photoshop I came across the awesome YouTube videos from Jan Loos, in which he's progressively creating a pretty awesome world map.
I decided to give it a try. I read some stuff about how tectonic movement, climate, vulcanos, mountains, and rivers come to live, and just started while watching the video Jan is creating his own map.
It took me some time, but I'm mostly finished for now.
The map should represent a prototype, which i´ll work on from time to time in the future, to improve it, part after part.
Since I'm not very profound with Photoshop the creation of the whole map from scratch took me like, idk, like 40+ hours, but it was very fun and worth it in the end.
Some things still need to be improved, like flattening the areas where the rivers flow through. I'm not that happy with the lakes too, so I may make some fundamental changes on these both things. The cilmate is a pretty big topic itself so there sure is spacke for improvement too. I also want to add some unique fantasy/scifi features, or areas to the continental / countire view.
Here is the Map in low resolution, if you guys want to get deeper into it, you can read the rest of the description below, and take a look at the associated files I put in a OneDrive Folder.
Attachment 101718
Folder:
https://1drv.ms/f/s!ArYQk8uyMD3cpHTEKxcndA4xrdFJ
Scaling:
Since scaling was kind of a problem, the world is only 1800*1200 km big. 1 pixel are meant to be 100 meters, so the whole image is 18000x12000 pixels big right now.
My laptop was barely able to compute this in Photoshop, and since rivers needs to be at least 1 pixel in width to be seen on the picture, I did not want to scale 1 pixel bigger than 100m.
Its fine with me, 2.16 Million square kilometers are pretty much space I think. It's just a little planet though.
Rivers & Lakes:
So back to the Rivers and Lakes, of course the mountain rivers are not all 100m in width. Only bigger rivers meant to be seen in the world view, and they are also might not 100m in width too.
There are a lot of other little lakes and rivers which are not able to be seen in the world view.
As i already mentioned I'm not sure about the rivers and lakes, I may will just let a few big ones be on the world map, and make some more detailed, and more logic in the continental or country view. Idk yet.
Ice Caps:
As you might already recognized, there are no ice caps. There also will be no ice caps. I don't need them for my use. Maybe the sea water has just a super high salinity.
Climate:
The planet has no seasons, so its rotation axis is parallel to the one of the Sun in its solar system.
The climate is kind of Earth like, so the temperatures are pretty much the same, and the movement of the air is following the same principles too.
Since I'm not very profound in the topic, I renounced on super detailed land mass dependent air movements.
Some regions are influenced by warm or cold sea currents. You will find some pictures which should give an idea of the climate, the water and the air movements in the OneDrive folder.
If you have Photoshop you can just download the lower res psb file, so you are able to click through the different layers by yourself. The rivers and lakes will not be in that file, because I added them later, after computing up the resolution of the picture.
Landmass:
There are three different types of mountains, folding mountains, volcanic mountains, and ancient mountains.
The tectonic plates are capable to be seen in the normal image by recognizing the sea trenches and mountains.
There´s a tectonic layer too, in which you can see the plates and their movement.
Attachment 101746
The ancient mountains came to exist earlier in the life of the planet, they are not connected to the current tectonic movements.
There are 6 different continents and around 15 different countries with different humanoid or partly non humanoid species.
I think that's it so far.
You will see the process of creating the map, by looking at the uploaded images. I will describe the important parts here now too:
After the beginnings with a hand drawing and an app on my mobile device I watched Jan's videos and just did mostly the same what he did:
I rendered some shapes with clouds and the threshold filter, put them in a composition of continents and islands I liked.
Then I started creating some textures for land and sea, i just followed what Jan did, since I would have had no idea how to create that stuff on my own in Photoshop.
However, I experimented by myself with everything i saw, and created some textures I liked.
After that I put in the mountains, the hills, the sea trenches with some self-made brushes and adapted the edges and relief options in the layer style.
Then i colored everything, put in the forest and rivers and that's pretty much it. The light is coming from the top left.
Because this is a cartography forum i didn't tell anything about the content, names, races and the story of the world, if you are interested in that part too, i can also write something about that. Its pretty raw though.
Since I'm new to the topic I hope for some useful feedback, the logic of the world is pretty important to me, so if i miss something, or you have some other good input for me, please tell me!
/edit: The more i am reading here in the forums, the more i realize theres a lot of room for improvement. There's some great content here, its kind of overwhelming
Reply With Quote
Originally Posted by bandersnatch
