[WIP] Building a world from tectonics onward

[L1qu1dN1trog3n]

I always find island topography particularly hard, but that's an artefact of my need to keep a constant zoom level to avoid very disparate amounts of detail. What you've got here looks very nice though!

[MrBragg]

An attempt at something a little bit larger scale, this time an island ~ the size Madagascar but at 60 N.

madagaceland.png madagaceland_bump.png

[AlittleMango]

Oh i am loving this kind of detailing, always wanted to focus on a tectonically accurate map myself and you are doing such a stunning work
excited to see more once you have another update!

[MrBragg]

Oh i am loving this kind of detailing, always wanted to focus on a tectonically accurate map myself and you are doing such a stunning work
excited to see more once you have another update!

Thanks! Ask and you shall receive: Here's a first attempt at a full scale continent. Each "bar" on the graticule is 100 mi, for a sense of scale.

Please feel free to critique anything here. It's better to find out what I'm butchering now before I get too set on anything

ox_v1.png ox_proc_text.png

[morne]

Bra-vo. Seriously amazing work. Those have got to be the most naturalistic mountains I've seen come out of Wilbur (with a very large amount of handcrafted work lending to that result, I'm sure). You've got to do a write up on your process at some point.

If I had one nitpick, I guess it's the the river valleys in the lowlands are pretty uniform and narrow and seem to almost represent canyons based on the contours. But again, that's a very minor nitpick.

[MrBragg]

Thanks morne! The mountains definitely benefit from some really nice brushes, so Wilbur and I can't take all the credit The process is actually nothing particularly special and is mostly a collection of various techniques I've learned on here. If you're interested though I could detail it.

Regarding the river valleys, you're absolutely right. The final river incise step is probably a bit too strong, though if I draw in the rivers in blue it does an ok job of covering that up and allows me to be lazy and not have to experiment with different processes.

EDIT: Thanks for the rep! Just noticed that notification

[Tiluchi]

Agree with Morne, this is definitely some of the best Wilbur output I've ever seen! It's *almost* enough to get me to make the switch (but not quite, mostly because I'm on a Mac). Would love to see a tutorial for this process at some point.

[Charerg]

Well, this has advanced a lot! Congratz on finishing the first continent (which looks amazing, btw).

Very solid work overall, and looking forward to seeing more!

[MrBragg]

Because topography can get boring, and because climate and topography can feed back on each other, I’ve taken a bit of a detour into temperature modeling lately. Months ago I followed the Azelor / Charerg / AzureWings tutorial here and I wanted to compare the results of that to the Clima-sim method covered by Nikolai Lofving Hersfeldt which generates temperature isotherms on the basis of a very low resolution input geography.

For all of these, no attempt was made to correct for orographic temperature changes and no modification was made to the Clima-sim output to account for the influence of currents (which it ostensibly already includes). Apart from the input geography, all other Clima-sim parameters were kept at the default Earth values.

July Tutorial (left) and Clima-sim (right)
map6_july_temp_small.png climasim_july.png

The July maps have pretty remarkable agreement between the two methods and there really are only (to my eye, anyway) very minor differences. This is really neat and makes me happier than it probably should.

January Tutorial (left) and Clima-sim (right)
map6_jan_temp_small.png climasim_jan.png

For the January maps, the qualitative agreement is still pretty good, though the differences are much more pronounced. The Clima-sim maps are a bit warmer at the equator, which likely doesn’t impact all that much since it’s always going to be hot, and are also appreciably warmer at the poles. Particularly in the northern hemisphere, the 0 C isotherm is quite far north, which pushes the “C” climates far to the north and eliminates the Dfc climates in the northernmost latitudes entirely.

I’m not 100% sure what to make of this January discrepancy. Perhaps the lack of land at very high latitudes allows for much better heat transport by the oceans and so moderates the high latitude temperatures a lot. There could also just be a systematic temperature anomaly in winter that makes all of the Clima-sim output warmer than it should be. I'm going to keep messing around with this, but wanted to post these results here in case they're interesting for anyone.

[Tiluchi]

Thanks for posting this! I have always wondered about the practical differences between the Azelor tutorial and the Nikolai's much-more-involved version. The latter honestly struck me as a great deal of additional work and processing power for what seems like a less-exact result. I was also skeptical of his results that seemed too warm at the poles for my liking (the final result for Teacup Ae had no south polar tundra despite having a large continent at something like 85º south). My initial guess is that the Clima-sim methods understate the cooling effects of having a great deal of land directly next to the poles, which is likely to result in extensive ice-caps and thus cooler temperatures even in summer than what an agnostic model predicts. Clima-sim even allows for inputting ice caps into the land cover map, but it seems this doesn't matter much.

Of course, the Clima-sim algorithm is much more advanced than the Cartographer's guild model that much more strictly uses Earth as a base, and I'm not a climatologist and haven't fiddled around with Clima-sim at all. Perhaps there's something obvious I'm missing here, but to my eyes the results produced manually using the Azelor/Charerg/AzureWings method seem more plausible to me.