[WIP] The Continent of Zasháve

[woodb3kmaster]

Zasháve is the largest continent of my fictional planet of Askath, and is the home of my main conlang, Gomain (further information here). Covering an area of over 17.5 million square miles, it's home to a large variety of climates and cultures. It's my intention to make a series of maps of the continent and its subregions, but for now, I'm focusing on improving its terrain.

When I made the first map of Zasháve, I followed Mark Rosenfelder's map-drawing tips (here), but I'm not terribly satisfied with how realistic the mountains look (especially since my hand-drawn shading isn't totally consistent in its shadow directions). To remedy this issue, I'm following mbartelsm's "Realistic Mountains with Photoshop and Wilbur" tutorial, though with ten elevation levels instead of four, and adding a base height level to preserve the coastlines. As part of this effort, I've already updated the hills to get the lighting on them consistent, though they'll inevitably turn out differently after I run the finished heightmap through Wilbur. I also want to replace the current terrain colors (also hand-painted in Photoshop) with a series of gradient maps, based on what I've read in a number of tutorials that make use of them.

With all that said, here are the two maps I've made so far. The first is a physical map that attempts to color the different climates realistically while keeping them distinct. The second, which I just exported tonight, is a linguistic map. Both thumbnails below link to the full-resolution maps (which are frickinhuge PNGs and therefore not suitable for direct display here).

[Robulous]

Fantastic I love seeing an ambitious project like this, very impressive. I'm working on a similar scale world which I must get into a more presentable form.

I love the landform and the mountain effect, though zooming in the mountain chains are a little too regular and linear. What you have is great, but real mountains are broken up fractally in all directions. I also wonder how that enormous circular chain of mountains was formed with a sea at its centre, it suggests a vast impact crater or hypervolcano more than something formed by plate tectonics.

My only actual criticism: I don't like that blue outer glow. It makes your coastline fuzzy zoomed out, and appear to be floating above the sea. I'd recommend either drawing in some proper continental shelf geography, tone down the shade, or just skip it. It pulls the eye away from the gorgeousness of your continent, which is what the viewer should be focussing on.

Well done and welcome to the guild, and have some rep for a great first contribution!

[woodb3kmaster]

Thanks, Robulous! I'm glad you like the maps so far. (I forgot to mention that Askath is around 15% smaller than Earth, so a degree of latitude is around 94 km/59 mi. The continent ended up much bigger than I expected when I calculated its area, but I'm okay with that.)

The mountains' regularity is precisely what I hope to fix by eroding them in Wilbur. I've been trying to follow the existing ridgelines when painting my heightmap (mostly to preserve river courses), but based on your comment, I think I'd be better off going with a less strict interpretation of the mountains, in order to raise my chances of getting a decent fractal pattern. As for the ring of mountains, I've assumed (and my recent tectonic map reflects it) that the northern and western sides of the chain are ancient plate collisions whose associated faults are no longer active (somewhat like the Appalachians or Ural Mountains). However, I'm still working out the details on all of that. Fleshing out the plate tectonics should also let me draw proper continental shelves, resolving your critique of the outer glow (which I'm also less than enthused about).

Thanks for the great comments! You've given me some new ideas to try out as I keep working on the maps.

[woodb3kmaster]

After untold hours getting my starting heightmap the way I wanted it, and the past week or more running Wilbur's erosion filters at all hours, I think my heightmap for the continent is almost finished. Here's a shaded and hypsometrically-colored rendering of it: Image linked because it's too big to be uploaded as an attachment

The main thing that's left to do is fix the valleys between the parallel ridges. They're currently closed basins, which Wilbur is all too happy to fill, so I'm going to work on connecting them together and punching some gaps in the outer ridges so they're no longer basins. After that, I'll probably do one more cycle of basin fill/incise flow/precipiton erosion before remapping the altitudes to make the lowlands actually low and exporting the final heightmap for use in the new maps.

As usual, comments/advice greatly welcome.

[woodb3kmaster]

I'm finally satisfied with the heightmap, so I've exported it and created the following contour map from height-based selections:

zashave-contour.png

This contour map will allow me to place climates (and biomes, following mbartelsm's tutorial on the subject) more accurately.

Next on my agenda, however, is updating river and lake placement to fit the new topography. I've exported river and basin maps from Wilbur to aid me in the process, but a decent amount of this work will be more artistic (part of my reason for using a contour map in the first place). More updates to come, but in the meantime, I welcome all comments, critiques, etc.

[Robulous]

Looks good - personally I've not managed to get such good results out of Wilbur, perhaps I should persist more. Look forward to seeing more.

Btw Xsafric - is that an enclave of another nation on the river valley, or are they separate nations like Senegal and Gambia?

[darcycardinal]

I'm finally satisfied with the heightmap, so I've exported it and created the following contour map from height-based selections:

This contour map will allow me to place climates (and biomes, following mbartelsm's tutorial on the subject) more accurately.

Next on my agenda, however, is updating river and lake placement to fit the new topography. I've exported river and basin maps from Wilbur to aid me in the process, but a decent amount of this work will be more artistic (part of my reason for using a contour map in the first place). More updates to come, but in the meantime, I welcome all comments, critiques, etc.

Hello woodb3kmaster, looks like the map is progressing nicely! I'm not all that familiar with mapping on a world scale, but i can tell you put some mad time into this project. Looks like its paying off too. The new height map you have shown is doing okay, though perhaps a softer coloring scheme and a better transition to sea could enhance this map. I'm assuming there is still quite a bit of tweaking you are going to do still.

-darcycardinal

[woodb3kmaster]

Thank you both very much!

Looks good - personally I've not managed to get such good results out of Wilbur, perhaps I should persist more. Look forward to seeing more.

Btw Xsafric - is that an enclave of another nation on the river valley, or are they separate nations like Senegal and Gambia?

Perhaps a major reason the results turned out that way is simply the amount of erosion I put the map through - I probably had Wilbur running almost non-stop for over a week (due mostly to my heightmap covering 110 megapixels), running through a cycle of percentage noise, incise flow, and multiple passes of precipiton erosion, for the most part. It took a lot of erosion to turn my original terraced mountains into smooth slopes, and I found myself having to lower my original river channels several times, especially where they run through canyons. There are still some things I'm not completely happy with, such as the high valleys in some of my mountain ranges, but I'm willing to work with what I have now.

As for Xsafric - both of those brown areas belong to the same language family (which is what that map depicts), but whether they're in the same country is still up in the air for now. Like our own world, I can imagine there being a lot of linguistically diverse countries on Askath, including in that area.

Hello woodb3kmaster, looks like the map is progressing nicely! I'm not all that familiar with mapping on a world scale, but i can tell you put some mad time into this project. Looks like its paying off too. The new height map you have shown is doing okay, though perhaps a softer coloring scheme and a better transition to sea could enhance this map. I'm assuming there is still quite a bit of tweaking you are going to do still.

-darcycardinal

Thanks, darcy! The contour map above is, indeed, not a finished product, and is really more of a planning aid for future, more polished maps. That said, I'll see if I can come up with a less vivid color scheme, along with the water transition.

For now, I'm working on tracing over my existing rivers in Illustrator, and simultaneously adding more rivers based on Wilbur's river flow and basin maps. I also expect to start working through Azelor's climate tutorial soon, now that I have a suitable elevation map. I have some old preliminary work I did for the first version of this map years ago, which should make the tutorial go somewhat faster.

[Robulous]

Perhaps a major reason the results turned out that way is simply the amount of erosion I put the map through - I probably had Wilbur running almost non-stop for over a week (due mostly to my heightmap covering 110 megapixels), running through a cycle of percentage noise, incise flow, and multiple passes of precipiton erosion, for the most part. It took a lot of erosion to turn my original terraced mountains into smooth slopes

Goodness that's a lot of work. I was only doing a couple of passes I guess that's why! Fantastic results though, perhaps I should give it more of a go. Did you use a specific tutorial?

[woodb3kmaster]

Thanks! I found it necessary to do all that work, mostly due to how I made my starting heightmap. I started out following mbartelsm's "Realistic Mountains with Photoshop and Wilbur" tutorial - especially when making the heightmap, which mostly follows the steps he gives in that tutorial (and produced a map that was mostly split between four elevations on land). Even at this stage, I added some steps of my own so as to preserve my original shorelines and water features, mainly through (1) creating a lower elevation for the entire land base and (2) overlaying a copy of my rivers/lakes layer to slightly darken the map where I wanted water features.

When it came to eroding the map, however, I switched to following waldronate's CSU Johnsondale tutorial, more or less. The number of Precipiton passes he recommends in that tutorial was really slowing Wilbur down, so I opted to use fewer passes at a time. My workflow at this point went more or less like this:

1. Load my river/lake mask as a selection and lower it by some amount. More lowering was needed in areas where I wanted canyons, since they kept filling up.
2. Apply percentage noise - sometimes more on lower elevations and less on higher ones.
3. Erosion cycle or fill basins.
4. Incise flow with various settings, depending on what I wanted to achieve at that point.
5. Anywhere from 2-8 passes with Precipiton erosion, with a small amount of noise per sample.

Once the above steps had turned my original terraces into smooth slopes and added some new river channels, I applied an exponent filter to the lower half of the map, so that the difference between the lowlands and highlands was more noticeable. I also lowered the highest 3000m of my mountains by 1500m to get those roughly parallel ridges and ran some more erosion on them. Eventually, I was satisfied enough with the results to export a finished heightmap, along with a series of height-based selections that I used to make the contour map above.

I gave Azelor's climate script a try last night and got some puzzling results. I'm going to compare them to my temperature and precipitation maps to see how I can get closer to my old map's climate distribution. Once I'm satisfied with that, I'll be able to place biomes.