Fantasy World Map

[Raptori]

Okay time for another update!

### Latest WIP ###

Current continents
6000px x 3000px so you can see some more detail if you want
continents.jpg

Antimeridian Islands
These still aren't exactly right, but they're a bit better. I'll have to shift the map around to work on them properly since at the moment they're right on the edge.
islands-antimeridian.jpg

Meridian Islands
Almost completely removed the islands here, and tidied up the coastline a bit. The bay of islands 60° N (just above the centre of this image) are the centre of the first civilisation I've developed for the world, so it's most important that this area looks good
islands-meridian.jpg

North Pole
Tidied up the coast a bit.
pole-north.jpg

South Pole
Removed these islands completely, then altered the shape of the small continent. Still not happy with it.
pole-south.jpg

I've also sketched in the climates over the top of the map. I'l try to fix the southern continent and antimeridian islands, then tidy up the climate map and post it a bit later on

[Raptori]

I did the bits of tidying and then started doing the rainfall maps (and planned to do temperature maps too), but I was thinking that just doing it by educated guesswork would be far less effort and would probably come up with a similar result. Since I'm feeling lazy, I just gave up and guessed.

### Latest WIP ###
Climate
climate.jpg

Rainfall - January (abandoned)
rainfall-january.jpg

Rainfall - July (abandoned)
rainfall-july.jpg

I'm sure I've messed up somewhere, but it looks vaguely ok to me... but feel free to tell me what I've managed to get completely wrong, it's still less effort than doing it properly


Edit: just realised I didn't upload this!

Currents
currents.jpg

It's a little bit messy but it should be roughly correct

[vorropohaiah]

• Open Google Earth
• Click "Add" on the top toolbar
• Click "Image Overlay"
• Click "Browse..." and select your image
• Click the "Location" tab further down the window
• Enter 90° 0'0.00"N, 180° 0'0.00"E, 90° 0'0.00"S, 180° 0'0.00"W in the North, East, South, and West boxes respectively
• Click "OK"

for the life of me i cant get it to work. im doing the above but its only loadinfg a small patch of the map. ive tried in different resolutions

sorry for the hijack!

[Raptori]

for the life of me i cant get it to work. im doing the above but its only loadinfg a small patch of the map. ive tried in different resolutions

sorry for the hijack!

No worries! You have a screenshot? Does it look like the map is in the correct place, or is the entire map just shown in a small section of where it should be? I've had both problems a couple of times actually.

When it was in the correct place but only sections are loading, I just restarted Google Earth and it worked fine after that, no idea what was going wrong. When it was in the wrong location, I think I had to restart as well and then re-enter the co-ordinates...

[vorropohaiah]

ive checked all the troubleshooting tips i could find and nothing seemed to help. i tried removing the atmosphere, deleting the cache. I either end up with a partial image that covers a small part of the globe or nothing. As i enter the co-ordinates i see the image distort to match them though whenever I enter the East co-ordinates it disappears.

not to worry though i can do the same thing in PS

[Raptori]

That's a shame, I wonder what's going wrong with it :/

One other idea: it's possible that your map is being rendered underneath the 3D terrain (or that your computer just doesn't like the 3D terrain and messes it up for some reason). To turn that off, click "Tools" > "Options", then un-tick the box next to "Use 3D Imagery" and click "OK". *fingers crossed that this one works!*

You could also increase the altitude of the image overlay a little to see if that makes any difference, but that would only help if the 3D is the problem, and in that case the above would be a much better solution

[Raptori]

Haven't had much time to work on the map recently - work's been busy, plus I've been reading a couple of things that are giving me a ton of ideas for the world, and I don't want to put effort into the map and then have to change it later...

However, most of what I want to add appears to be fitting in perfectly with what I've got so far, so I spent a little bit of time starting to paint the first continent. At the moment it feels like it's missing something, so I'm taking a break from it (hence the errors like the green in the top left, and green between the mountains and desert towards the bottom right). It could be the lack of rivers (though they'd be too small to show up at this scale), but can anyone spot anything else that looks missing?!

### Latest WIP ###

center-north.jpg

[Pixie]

Are you aiming for a realistic satellite view? If that's the case, I think it's your mountains that are you giving you that feeling.. they're missing the green winding lines that are the valleys, those could also lead to some river lines (darker brown if through dry land, bluish/darker green if through grassland, invisible in forest).

Overall, color wise, maybe moving the whole lot more into the brownish gray near the mountains.

I'm leaving you with a real color satellite image of China, for comparison, as it seems to be more or less at the same latitude than this continent (seeing your map above) and also features a large mountainous area.
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedi...China_BMNG.jpg

[Raptori]

Are you aiming for a realistic satellite view? If that's the case, I think it's your mountains that are you giving you that feeling.. they're missing the green winding lines that are the valleys, those could also lead to some river lines (darker brown if through dry land, bluish/darker green if through grassland, invisible in forest).

Sort of - I'd love to go for satellite realism, but not sure I'd have the time to put in that much effort. Something vaguely resembling realism is my intention though.

Yeah I think you're right about the mountains. I've actually re-done them several times now and never felt particularly happy with them. I can't really put rivers in at this scale sadly; I tried it and apparently each pixel is more than two miles across, so only the biggest rivers at their widest points would show up... I'll take a look at how river valleys and basins look like at a similar scale on real maps to see if I can get some of the effect.

Overall, color wise, maybe moving the whole lot more into the brownish gray near the mountains.

I'm leaving you with a real color satellite image of China, for comparison, as it seems to be more or less at the same latitude than this continent (seeing your map above) and also features a large mountainous area.
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedi...China_BMNG.jpg

According to Google Earth you're incorrect, though only slightly!

China lines up roughly from the bottom of the continent to the top of the large island off the east coast of the continent - roughly the same latitudes as the desert in the latest image actually. The rest of the continent aligns more closely to the latitudes of Europe, and it has a combination of laurentian, maritime and mediterranean climates (at the moment).

However, I think you're right that a bit more colour differentiation would do some good. I think I'll move the edges of the mountains further apart, and make the area in the middle into an arid plateau like the Tibetan plateau in that map you posted. I think that kind of topography would make a lot more sense than the crumpled mountain ranges that I've got at the moment, and would be awesome for a bit of variety.

One thing I reeeally need to start paying attention to at this stage is the projection. When I worked on the coastlines I kept switching to look at the map on Google Earth to see if it worked properly, but I've completely neglected that for this step so far. I think that's another reason the whole continent looked so odd to me - it's actually shaped very differently to how it appears in the previous image. A quick projection of it to show the difference:

center-north-projection.jpg

Thanks for the feedback, it was very helpful - now I've got some stuff to move forward with

[Pixie]

If you are reconsidering those mountains, maybe you could add some more "tectonic" detail to that orogeny area. So, take the following if you like (if not, I had fun imagining it anyway, no worries).

- looking at you tectonic map, the plate on the right is a oceanic plate moving SW-ward, the one on the bottom is a partially oceanic plate with some significant land (maybe remnants of an old continent) at this end, moving northwards, and the plate on the right with the most of the land is mainly continental.
- now, to figure which goes under which you take into account plate density - generally speaking, old oceanic crust is denser, continental crust is "lighter"
- I would definitely make the part with the desert the less dense crust of the three, as that would fit my supposition that it is very old crust, this means the other two would sink under it
- this means the plateau would be in the deserted area (continent under continent generates plateaus - west USA or Tibet are the perfect examples)
- there would be significantly less land mass on the west plate (or, in other words, the mountain range gets shifted eastwards), as the oceanic crust sinks as it meets the continental crust.
- the shape of the triple junction would be basically given by the junction of the two continental plates, so figure the accurate border for these two and then add the oceanic one (there isn't really any location like this on Earth and I will try to explain why next)
- now, consider this is going on for a while (like millions of years, as always).. one of the continental plates is being pushed up, this means it will rise even further in the region, which in turns moves the border between that plate and the oceanic crust away from that triple point.
- over time I reckon this generates a "tongue" of up-moving plate breaking the triple point into two separate ridges, or at least, the tongue spreads as far as a point where two of the plates no longer collide head on but slide in opposite directions (transform faults)

I loved this bit of "what if", as I said, use it as you want it. I would get a bit of plasticine and try to figure it out. But feel free to ignore it