Legrica - WIP

[Seraphiel]

Hi! I have been lurking on these forums for a long time, but this is my first time posting. I've been trying to work on this world for a long time, but keep getting frustrated and leaving it for a long time, coming back, leaving, again and again. So I'm trying to get a fresh start here now, and actually getting help from these forums.

My eventual goal is create a map of similar quality to http://www.cartographersguild.com/re...ur-thrown.html Which is asking a lot, i know. I have tried following the tutorial by a2area for The Genesis of Israh; A Tutorial, however i found it overtly complicated with the amount of incise flows being used. And his planet creation involved an ice age that further complicated things. Following his tutorial exactly lead to very weird patterns of erosion and flows. So ya, erosions have been a problem.

One of my biggest frustrations with previous iterations has been plains and parallel rivers. I had gone through the appropriate corrections: fill basins, select flat areas, 3% noise; before starting to incise flows and erosions. However, this keeps creating weird sets of deep valleys throughout the entire plain. And it just doesnt look good or even natural.

plain problems.jpg plain problems

So this is where I'm at now. I have a world map generated in Fractal Terrains Pro. I've already edited it some in order to remove holes and lakes and such; and tweak islands and shapes.

To prevent giant plains like above, I have looked for basins using the fill basins tool, went back and changed heights in an attempt to prevent large basins from occuring.

As with most FTpro maps, the mountains tend to be generated into the middle of the land masses. I've tweaked things a bit to create some assymetry, but was wondering if you people think it's enough.

I would also like to consider tectonic plates as well, but that can be saved for another post.

small map.jpg new base map

In summary: I have a new base map. I have attempted to prevent large basins from occurring. Are mountains spread naturally? Do you have any suggestions regarding the implementation of tectonic plates or erosion techniques?

[jbgibson]

In reverse order, I don't do any automated eroding, so I can't help there. When I start with a Fractal Terrains world I'll look for improbable basins and lift and/or smooth til they're more plausible. I tend to isolate FT-genned rivers on their own layer and use them as suggestions, wiggling my own watercourses into place including minor water-gap type editing to figuratively drain closed basins .

Your mountain ranges do show improvement over an as-genned FT planet. They still have about the same degree of roughness - maybe you could blunt some of the smaller interior ranges, turning them from recent uplift/ collision events to more Appalachian/ Ozark equivalents. Since you're willing to do some tectonics maybe with details you can make a few massive interior ranges to be ongoing plate collision situations (Himalayas). Since you show sea floor detail, try manually digging sharp slots of subduction trenches just offshore of some of the nearly-coastal ranges. Add a few more conical peaks and you'll be representing subduction volcanic belts (earth's Pacific ring of fire). You could manually drop in one or more rift valleys to show divergence.

I'm not sure why you want to prevent massive plains -- is it that you want to avoid having them look heavily eroded like your first pic? An FT limitation is generating the whole planet with the same fractal degree. Manually adding big swaths of plains, steppes, and plateaus is a necessity. If you don't need to keep the sea floor detail, consider the trick of expanding continental shelves, then dropping sea level in some places to get coastal plains.

Take a look at your coasts worldwide. See how all have that similar degree of roughness? Look at Earth and note wide swaths of coastline by that are smoothly sculpted into barrier islands, sandy beaches, swampland.

It can be a pain doing all the manual editing, but the results can be way better than defaults produce. I wish I had the persistence to get into applying Wilbur to planets -- you're ahead of me there! Looks to me like you have a good start - I'm looking forward to seeing it progress.

Oh, and thanks for jumping right in with a substantive contribution - maps in one's first post is worth a smidgen of rep!

[Seraphiel]

Not gonna lie, I havent been all that busy and i have no good excuse for not working on this during the past 2 weeks.
But I've only spent the last few days looking at plate tectonics and sketching out some possible plates for Legrica.

tectonic experiments.jpg

Here they are, with arrows to indicate movement in areas of importance. I tried to go for about 8 big plates with 5 small plates.
dhalsimrocks tutorial suggests 8 big and 8 small to match Earth. But i couldnt decide on how to split things up in order to create some smaller plates. My map has a few strictly oceanic plates, but most are continental, like Earth. I also attempted to place plate margins around the mountain ranges. I realize this layout is probably VERY far from being scientifically legitimate, but that's what you get for trying to work backwards.

Anyways, just looking for a bit of feedback on the plates at the moment.
Once I finalize those, I'll fix the mountains, continental shelves, etc to more closely fit with the plates.

[amberroberts09]

Very Nicely done Seraphiel

[Delvestius]

Neet, don't know if I ever saw a map with plat tectonics before. Quite unique.

[kestrelgrey]

I like the tectonic plates idea! You could even try sketching in some rough ocean currents. Might help visualize where coasts will smooth out. Looks like you've taken into account how tectonic plate movement creates mountains, which is cool. If that's what you were looking to do, there is that mountain range on the northeast section of the southernmost island that I don't quite see how it got pushed up. But it is right near the edge of the plate, so that could def. explain it.

Looking forward to see what you do with this. I've messed wit FT and Wilbur as well, and I agree - it can get weird.