[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.

[Tiluchi]

I've been remiss in commenting on this but it looks amazing! Echoing your comment on my own thread it's so cool to see this progress from essentially scratch to a full-on world map. Do you think you'll do bathymetry as well?

If I have one critique of the geology/topography it would be that the mountain ranges seem to rise quite precipitously in some spots to the extent that it seems like the topography cuts off abruptly at the coast (thinking mainly of the coastal mountain chains on your two western continents). Looking at the older elevation maps it seems that might be an issue of the shading rather than the actual topography, but it might look a bit more "natural" with some extra coastal plains in certain areas. Adding a narrow stroke along the coastlines might also help set apart the land areas a little bit. The color scheme is also rather dark to the extent that it's hard to make out some island areas, but I think that's mostly due to the shade of the oceans, which I expect will be modified at some point.

Overall it looks amazing! Really impressed at the realism and absurd level of detail in the topography, since I know how much work that requires even using Wilbur. Can't wait to see even more of this!