Mission of Gravity -- Rapidly Spinning World

[Naima]

May be I will retry in future to use explasm, bt honestly it gived me more headackes than actual info that I couln't manually find out by myself so far, but yet again I mostly dealt with realistic Earth like planets apart the one I did for Ausur, but even there I slightly altered features of the planet like size, density ,gravity and atmosphere but to very small changes to get a desertic worldscape mostly, its a delicate balance seems , as soon as you move a number here or there everything unbalances and life sustainability becomes difficult.

[Peter Toth]

I've been tinkering with ExoPlaSim extensively since my last post, but can't seem to obtain the optimal range of temperatures for my world. I've accepted the reality that most of "Frodo" will be either hot desert or tundra/icecap so now the main focus is to create just the right insolation and year length to get a minimum of 25 and a maximum of around 55 (Celsius) at the equator. (Frodo has negligible obliquity but a significant eccentricity; thus, temperature ranges will be primarily determined by eccentricity.)

I've reworked the topography as well as the planet map in case anyone would like to critique them. However, please understand these are by NO MEANS complete; if you scrutinize the maps you will see patches of low resolution topography that I intend to either work on in the future or neglect (if the area isn't relevant to the story). You will also see basins on the highest mountain ranges in the far north; this is a rendering error that I intend to correct in my next post. I realize the topography doesn't exactly correspond to a desert climate; thus, I'm hoping someone could let me know how glaring this inaccuracy happens to be.

Here are the reworked maps:

Planet.png

Continent Close Up.png

Anyways, I'm going to experiment with some other parameters until I arrive at my desired range of temperatures. As each simulation takes about 22 minutes, this may take a while!

Peter

[Peter Toth]

I certainly hope this update isn't as crappy as the last, because now I've finally made decent progress, having decided the final orbital parameters of Frodo (after some seemingly endless experimentation on ExoPlaSim). Using the updated values for insolation and year length, periapsis (summers) on Frodo are looking like this:

Summer.png

And apoapsis (winters) like this:

Winter.png

There's a subtle difference, with the land hotter during the summers and the oceans hotter during the winters.

And altogether, I very much like the updated Koppen map, which gives me plenty of Cfb (oceanic) climates on the east coast of the middle continent, where the story takes place, to balance the vast stretches of desert farther inland. It looks like the characters will have to transition directly from Cfb or Cfc to tundra (ET) climate as they travel towards the north pole. I suppose the rapid drop to frigid temperatures will be very brutal!

Koppen.png

Here is an updated world map with a colour scheme that I particularly like:

World 2.png

And here is a zoomed in version of the globe, centered where the action takes place:

World 1.png

This time, I've taken care not to place carved mountains in the middle of deserts; also, I've used a different algorithm to create a mosaic of varying mountain patterns in an attempt to mimic mother nature. Would you consider this an improvement over the last?

Anyway, I've still got a long way to go before this one's complete!

Peter

[Peter Toth]

Hi Guild,

I'm asking for an honest critique here as I'm not certain how to proceed, in my effort to improve the realism of my latest topography algorithm. I'm not aiming for accurate plate tectonics here, only nice looking mountains and topography. At a first glance, I'm not totally convinced with the cliff-like coasts around the inland sea in the middle left hand region of the map, although perhaps it's no glaring error in your opinion. I'm also planning to redraw the peninsula ending in a chain of islands on the upper right.

I've reprojected the map using G. Projector to include the entire route from equator to pole, so this will be the final format before I start adding cities and other information.

Final Frodo.png

Could some of you Guild artisans recommend any further actions?

I so appreciate any feedback.

Peter

[MrBragg]

I think your intuition is right, and I'd agree that the extensive regions where what looks like quite elevated terrain ends abruptly at the coast--both the inland sea and also the southern coast--seems somewhat unlikely. I'm not sure what your elevation scale is, but if these are multi-100 m cliffs that otherwise appear well-eroded, I guess I'd expect more in the way of coastal plains / lowlands, even if just a narrow strip.

On a more practical note, I'm actually curious how you managed to get such cliffs? Except where I just manually masked out the seas, in my hands Wilbur always wanted to give me coastal plains, even when I didn't want them!

[nAUTILUS]

Hi, I think this project is very interesting as it is kind of the opposite of my tidally locked world which doesn't spin at all! I really like your terrain, would you be willing to share your method of creating it? Especially your Wilbur workflow interest me.

[Peter Toth]

Hi MrBragg and Nautilus,

Thank you for the feedback. I've taken the Photoshop burn tool and lowered some of the cliffs on every coast of my main continent, which I hope has resulted in some more realistic coastlines. I've also reworked the chain of islands extending from the peninsula in the northwest, and changed the colour scheme a bit.

Included are two projections: an equirectangular and an orthographic; I'm wondering which colour scheme looks better.

To answer your question, MrBragg, my unnatural coastal cliffs resulted from a fractal noise addition in the last phase of my process, after which I loaded my old coast (a bitmap file) and simply set its altitude to zero.

Hey Nautilus, is Noria the project you're referring to when you said you were working on a tidally locked world? I'd be very interested to see your progress on this worldbuilding endeavour, as I've attempted a similar situation in my project entitled "Kaunis," a planet with a 48-hour day tidally locked to a brown dwarf, which in turn revolves around a sunlike star. (I made a crucial error in the details, however, by not properly accounting for the brown dwarf's luminosity, although nobody seemed to notice.) By the way, my Wilbur workflow basically employs Miguel's process for creating mountains, with some minor modifications. Worldbuilding pasta offers a very nice algorithm for making any hand-drawn terrain look more realistic.

Final Equirectangular.png

Final Globe.png

Are the mountains okay or should I rework them? (I've already gone back to the drawing board about four times so far, just because I hate mediocre work.)

I hope to begin the next phase--the human aspect--very soon!

Peter

[nAUTILUS]

The mountains are perfect, very realistic. I wouldn't change too much and risk loosing this very good result. Definitely outstanding work. Do you have a link to this miguel mountain tutorial I keep hearing about?
My lasted map, Noria, is in fact part of my tidal lock world called the Strand. By the Noria map is only meant as a style test. I have done a lot of work on the Strand a couple of years ago and I'm just now getting back I to it. This led me to re-evaluate a lot of choices.

[Peter Toth]

Thank you Nautilus! Yes, I think I'll stop trying to improve on my topography and move on to other more important elements. Does everybody else concur that the mountains are at least acceptable enough to pass for an average Guild submission?

Regarding Miguel's tutorial, I'm having trouble finding it on the Internet, although I do have a copy saved to my PC. Send me a private message and I'll send the file to you by email. Or if another one of you could provide the link, I'd be delighted.

Regarding my latest progress, I've lowered some terrain to make the topography more "Earthlike" and added some texture to the main map, which you can see here:



(By the way, I don't know why there's a discontinuity halfway down the image. I'll have to fix that later.)

Hope that doesn't disappoint.

Peter

[Peter Toth]

Hi Guild,

Here are my final refinements to Frodo, which I'm quite pleased with. Could one of you (perhaps Naima or Ilanthar) please give me a critique?

The Main Equirectangular map:

Equirectangular.png

The Koppen Map:

Koppen.png

Periapsis Temperature Map:

Peri Temp.png

Apoapsis Temperature Map:

Apo Temp.png

Periapsis Precipitation Map:

Peri Precip.png

Apoapsis Precipitation Map:

Apo Precip.png

Now here is where the action takes place:

Globe1.png

Now a Koppen Map of this selection:

Globe2.png

And finally, a satellite view of planet Frodo:

Globe3.png

That's it for now.

Peter