Hael - WIP

[Rexotec]

I'm hoping to post this mainly to get me to actually work on it and not ruminate on it without actually doing anything. I work mainly in Photoshop although I use a few external programs like Wilbur (which involves me mashing my keyboard until it looks nice) for elevation, in future I might just do it manually for finer control. I also work in 3D but I haven't used it for mapping all that much (I can barely work in 2D as it is).

This here's Hael, which is wrapped up in a long-term worldbuilding project I've been doing, and I use for a lot of DnD campaigns. It's a southern continent roughly 40 to 70 degrees south, and part of the large, stormy world of Dragon's Eye. Some things I kept in mind were its super-thick atmosphere, powerful tides, and its position along a convergent oceanic boundary over a volcanic hotspot (meant to be centred on the big boy in the northeast). It has a lot of fantastical/alien features that aren't well translated to hard-climate mapping, so I'm posting this as a kind of mental note to stop trying to make it realistic and start making it pretty.

I have a lot of technical maps, including temperature, rainfall and climate maps, but as I was going over the process I found it more and more limiting and less and less useful of my time than just... making up the biomes I want. And none of them are really for show.

Base Map (the prettiest it looks so far)

Hael Base Map Gradient.png

Climate Map (doesn't include 'superhumid' zones, and 's' and 'w' regions are not correct, I'm also not sure if the 7km per pixel is accurate, but 5-10ish is about right, depending on latitude)

Hael KCC Map.png

I want to make it fun again to actually map out the world and start fleshing it out with all of the societies and cities I've been writing out, instead of mathematically assigning geographical features, so I'm hoping the talented guild artisans here will give me the motivation and feedback I need to get this project done, and looking okay.

[Rexotec]

Early days, overhauled and ripped out the land mask and mountain layers, added some basic colours and shading to the land and oceans, they probably still need some tweaking but I'm gonna go over them again once more concrete details are in (cities, towns, ruins, etc.). Still haven't figured out how to do the mountains yet, whether I want them to be more hand-drawn or have a proper elevation ramp for them, so I'm gonna leave it for now and ruminate. I also removed the surrounding continents for some better framing, although I'll admit it irks me just a little :/

Hael Base Colour.png