[WIP] Building a world from tectonics onward

[MrBragg]

Alright, I've finally gotten to the point of having done a first--and sometimes second / third / fourth--pass at texturing the whole world. Having to downsize from the native 12k x 24k to 2200 x 4400 in order to post here kind of takes away from the detail, but in any event I happily present at least the essence of v1.0 for comments and critiques!

silly_small2.png

[Agysea]

Hello, long time lurker here, i really love your work and was windering if you could tell me about your process behind your topography and also how you did these relief maps ? I know some pages earlier you briefly explained it but i wasnt able to understand much from that- How do you know the scale for your mountains and valleys ? How do you deal with Polar distortion ? And did you draw everything by hand or did you use Wilburg ? If yes what Wilbur settings ? Sorry for the many questions but i am trying to learn and am really intrigued with what you managed to create.

[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.