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Thread: WIP: unnamed Earh-like planet

  1. #251
    Guild Adept groovey's Avatar
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    China's Empire is definitely an historic case I want to study. Diamond talks about it around the last third of his book...but by then I was just quickly reading over, since I lost interest. I might have to check that part again.

    Awesome Pixie, I look fordward to it.

  2. #252
    Guild Artisan Charerg's Avatar
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    On the subject of the expansion of agriculture, it's interesting to note that agriculture can actually vary quite a bit. And the techniques utilized in said agriculture (and consequently, the lifestyle of the people doing it) also depend on their level of technology.

    For example, there's a large difference between a sort of semi-nomadic slash-and-burn agriculture that was widespread in historical times (the forests of the Mediterranean are thought to have disappeared as a result of this practice) and a truly settled agriculture. A stone-age people lacking the means to till the soil via ploughs would be fairly likely to practice slash-and-burn farming (unless the soil is soft enough to be hoed). Also, I think there was a form of semi-nomadic slash-and-burn pastoralism practiced by people in northern Europe, where tilling the soil requires ploughs before it can be turned into productive farmland. And since the peoples that brought agriculture to northern Europe lacked such, they instead used slash-and-burn to create grazing lands and relied on herds of cattle and sheep for their sustenance (primarily, some crops were probably also grown). At least in Finland the Corded Ware remains display no evidence of agriculture, but settlements were established close to meadows, and goat bones are found, which would imply this sort of lifestyle.

    As an interesting historical sidenote, the migrations of the Germanic tribes during the late Roman era may be related to the practice of slash-and-burn farming (at least wikipedia thinks so). Apparently, at least the more "primitive" of the Germanic tribes (the ones living further away from the Roman border) still lived in a mobile, semi-nomadic fashion, shifting their settlements periodically. I suspect that pastoralism also played a greater role in their economy as a result of this lifestyle, since herds of cattle and sheep are easy to move around.

    Another important point related to northern peoples in particular is the discovery of bog iron. Essentially, before the discovery of these ice age-formed deposits, northern Europe largely relied on imports for metals, with the majority of the populace probably still making use of stone tools. The adoption of iron was slow in northern Europe, but around 200 BC a productive smithing industry had evolved (in larger settlements).

    And with that, I think I've rambled on enough for now. I hope you find the above points useful, though!

    Edit:
    A small correction, when speaking of the soil in northern portions of Europe, I originally linked glacial till, which is actually a sediment type and not a soil type. The soil type in question is the podzol soil.
    Last edited by Charerg; 10-01-2015 at 10:15 AM.

  3. #253
    Guild Artisan Pixie's Avatar
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    Interesting stuff, Charerg, I had never heard of bog iron. I'm sure it'll be handy knowledge sometime in the future... (maybe further up in this process)
    Last edited by Pixie; 10-01-2015 at 01:50 PM.

  4. #254
    Guild Adept groovey's Avatar
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    Dammit, Pixie, I forgot your great point to Akubra back then about his heightmap... Earth's elevation is quite low in general, as the map you linked there shows... I totally forgot to remember that while redoing mine. Sigh, I guess I'm not done with it after all.

  5. #255
    Guild Artisan Pixie's Avatar
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    Don't feel despaired.

    You used Wilbur before. You can use it again, it will carve those wide valleys for you. Or, you can just take your grayscale heightmap, and use a low opacity black brush to lower elevations in some areas (or a lot of areas) and then run wilbur just a little bit to get back to a "realistic" appearance.

  6. #256
    Guild Adept groovey's Avatar
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    Yeah, I guess I can play with the fact tha Wilbur doesn't interpret the same amount of layers/elevation levels I have in PS, so I can pretend for some purposes the land is lower with the Wilbur version, but to one day maybe work out the climate... I'll need more specific info. So we'll see.

  7. #257
    Guild Artisan Charerg's Avatar
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    There's also an option in Wilbur called "Remap Altitudes" (under Filter -> Other), that allows you to adjust the relative heights. Although if you've gone through the "Fun with Wilbur"-tutorials, I suppose you're familiar with it.

  8. #258
    Guild Artisan Pixie's Avatar
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    If you have your heightmap in layers in photoshop, here's one form of making lower altitudes lower. I'm assuming each layer represents a certain altitude level and that each layer is, basically, a solid color shape. If this is the case, then you can try this:

    - duplicate each layer so to keep the original info and work only with the copies, hide everything else.
    - under these layers place a fully black layer
    - use the effect "colorize" in each layer, and set the color to pure white.
    (at this point, it should be a massive white equal to your landforms)

    - now, set the layers to a low opacity level (try 10%, or less, it depends on the total number of levels)
    - the result is whiter where you have a larger number of layers, good, but not final

    (from here you can take two options)

    1:
    - to decrease the overall altitude of the low lying areas, set the opacity of the lower levels to a smaller value, or increase
    and experiment until you're happy with the result

    2:
    - "select all" and "copy visible", paste into a new file, and "adjust levels" in order to make the grays darker
    Last edited by Pixie; 10-06-2015 at 12:38 PM.

  9. #259
    Guild Adept groovey's Avatar
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    Thanks for chipping in about my altitude issue. To be honest, my head has been elsewhere lately so I haven't found the motivation to figure out what to do with it. But now that Azelor has posted his new tutorial, I guess I gotta look into it again.

  10. #260
    Guild Adept groovey's Avatar
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    Well, I revised my height-map yet again in order to correct the excess of elevation of the previous one. For now I've simplified the elevation levels, 1.000m per level. I might add 0-250m and 250-500m later one, but since for Azelor's climate tutorial levels of 1.000m are recommended, for now it'll do.

    So here it is:

    03. HEIGHT MAP 13OCT15 (elevation redux).jpg

    - Is there too much of something?
    - Not enough of something?
    - Any improvements ideas?

    As always, its purpose is informational and to work out climate.

    EDIT:

    Here's my go on the superficial oceanic currents. I'm not sure if the poles are right and what the heck is going on south of the big eastern mega continent. I added numbers to land/island areas which are confusing in case you need to comment.

    04. Ocean Currents (13-10-15).jpg

    With 10º grid:

    04. Ocean Currents (13-10-15)with GRID.jpg

    So what needs fixing?


    Step 3 : Atmospheric pressure systems. Do these old maps Azelor did a while ago still apply? I "cleaned" them up to be overlayed to the new height-map.

    JANUARY
    05. Atmospheric Features JAN (13-10-15).jpg

    JULY
    05. Atmospheric Features JUL (13-10-15).jpg
    Last edited by groovey; 10-13-2015 at 01:09 PM.

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