Umm what do you mean you pressed lay? But yeah you have to do that with every y plate if I understand you correctly. As to direction you kinda have to play around and see what makes the most sense.
Ok i finalized the shapes mre or less , still not 100% happy but Iguess I will never be ... I started to port to g plates but I am stuck at the final part I made all the circles from pole along the planet but then? I pressedlay andmy continent disappeared , also do I have to do that for each plate ? How I decide the direction for each plate or us it decided by gplates?
Umm what do you mean you pressed lay? But yeah you have to do that with every y plate if I understand you correctly. As to direction you kinda have to play around and see what makes the most sense.
Ok I have reached the drawing lines and dots point, but honestly I dunno how to simulate any motion onthat sphere in gplates, I can understand that I can "guess" directions and use the dots to draw lines in a more curved way , but how I do get the "working" movements? How do I know that my decision to make flow a continent on a direction is right or not?
I am posting the new and possibly latest version of my world , geography plain , with plates and the G plate sample .
Silouette
Helium_Grography_silouette.jpg
does it looks enough different from earth and natural ? How can I calculate the % of sea?
Geography
Helium_Grography.jpg
where are the mountain ranges, I have reduced some and scattered a bit mor from having all on a single coast side
The largeness of poles are due to projection they are actually smaller island / continents , wich will be covered in ice anyway .
Plates
Helium_Grography2.jpg
here are the possible idea for the Major plates, I redraw reducing thenumber trying to get first the major plates and later the smaller ones ... I haven't added directions yet , but only possible openings dorsals because honestly I am not convinced at all on how I segmented the world .
Please feel free to "redraw" the plates I did as I am not convinced at all if are right ...
In Gplates
gplates.jpg
So is gplate only usefull for "deciding" how to draw curved lines and see where the continents go on a sphere?
Projection
Helium_projection.jpg
Here perhaps is better to see the curvature and the equidistant projection .
After calculation the % of sea is 70 % just as I wanted .
perhaps this can help to identify better possible plates?
Last edited by Naima; 07-22-2014 at 08:51 AM.
I think you are missing one important detail about the tutorial on using g.plates (and you may be missing a key point in plate tectonics as well, so I'll explain).
Each plate has its own "euler pole". That's the point on earth that serve as axis for the rotation of the plate and does not have to be (it never is, unless by freak coincidence) the north or the south pole. We discussed Euler Poles starting with groovey's map on page 4 of his thread.
In the tutorial, did you notice this image:
step_06.gif
On the right upper corner, you have to enable pole, to make the white arrow (on the globe) visible and movable.
The small circles are then drawn with the center at the same location as this pole.
(hope this helps)
ok but what's the point then if I put it in same place of the pole? Earth is like that? and apart that then the circles are only usefull for getting alignement of dots? then I shoudl move manually the continents?
right... let's go step by step...
1. from what I can gather, you understand what the euler pole is.
2. g.plates can make the plate rotate around the euler pole that you define
3. so, yes, you move the continents manually
So, what are the small circles for...
1. since the small circles are centered at the same pole, they represent the rotation using that euler pole
2. that rotation is exactly the movement of the plate
3. the dots are there to help you transform the information in g.plates (which is drawn in a sphere) into your rectangular map
Was this helpful?
Yes ok ... so I actually use Gplates as a mapping reference rather than actually make it do the job of shifting my continents , wich is what I understood befoure ... How I do tthen to place correct belieavable opening dorsals in the world ? Always by hand? I mean always at my own judgement and then see how that looks in gplates?
I actually tought that I woudl have seen my continents move , shift and crush against eachother ...
Anyway ... if u have time can u sugest me a new platization of the surface ? Mine doesn't convice me at all ... , I am almoust getting ready to draw the dorsals and drop FT to go into wilbur ...
So, while watching the Tour de France, I also had a look at your map and tried a quick attempt at "platization" of the surface (I like the word, don't I know if it exists though)...
here's what I came up with:
my_take.gif
Red lines are divergent, black lines are convergent.
The way I work this stuff is starting with a couple of divergent boundaries in the larger oceans and then work out masses of land that have moved away from there.
Also, there are some white arrows and white numbers, these are notes from g.plates, just to give you an example of how to work it out.
There's still plenty to do, of course, and this is a suggestion that may not see itself through. It's always a tricky puzzle and sometimes you just want to throw the towel to the ground - I'm sure you read groovey's thread among others.
Thanks ... I have a planned workflow between Fractal terrains-->Gplates-->FT-->Wilbur-->Worldmachine-->Photoshop ....
Hopefully I will get where I am heading too possibly I want to draw as much as possible inside FT befoure dismissing it because I love the offset prescale tools ... right now I drawed a kind of Nile/Colorado river , I painted dry climate to obtained a kind of Desert Region so to have only one big river ...
Ok, so you've got a lot of work ahead. I am very interested in seeing where you get to.
A work of advice about carving rivers and painting mountains:
Tectonics IS the mountain building mechanism.. the sole one, apart volcanoes. And tectonics doesn't only tell where mountains are, they also define the orientation of the mountain ridges and the orientation of faults/peaks. When using automated erosion in FT or Wilbur, this is overlooked and what would be a "ridge with sort of parallel lines of peaks becomes something without visible patterns". Mind this as you work on elevation, to get a more realistic look.