December Entry: Kazh - Homeworld of the Klarr

[ravells]

The differences are pretty minimal between the two (from an arty farty point of view)...except you've got to reposition the rivers and cities now!

[su_liam]

I've settled on an Eckert VII for display. For editing purposes, I'm using latlong to avoid problems.

As part of my development work, I created a watershed basins map. I think I need to clip my elevations to the continents and try again. But for now.

Kazh_Basins.png

[ravells]

Everything looks great but: you are going to do something about the river presentation? you're not going to let those giant earthworms crawl all over the map are you?

[Ascension]

The longer the hair on those fuzzy caterpillars the colder it's going to be

[ravells]

Brrrr!!

[su_liam]

The rivers are fat, because I had an easier time editing them that way. This is in no way a presentation specimen.
Once I get the rivers more or less the way I like them, enough in wet places, fewer in dry places, actually reaching the #$$@% ocean(!), that kind of thing, then I'll set them to a narrower stroke. The ugly basin map and some other ugly stuff I'm messing with will also go away once I draw out my desired boundaries.

Working out the climates is going to be a nightmare. Just not looking forward to it...

[su_liam]

I realize my WIP is in a bad state of broken. I also realize the competition is pretty stiff. Gotta drop a lot of my world building and just get down to cartography. Should have another WIP soon.

[su_liam]

I think I'm done with climates, at least as far as this comp is concerned. Now on to labeling and the making of it beautiful.

By way of a legend, the greyed areas at the top and bottom of the image are glaciated areas. My temperature model is too sensitive to latitude, too insensitive to altitude and going to have to do. The darker green at the center of the map is the tropical regions. Same temperature model, so... yeah.

The rivers will look better if I can get them vectorized. I wasn't at all happy with my previous river network. I still have too many rivers in areas that will be desert. Speaking of desert, I intend to add a composite desert effect as soon as I can get back to photoshop, which requires me to boot up my Mac volume. I figure I'll make sure I have all of my Wilbur, Saga and ArcGIS stuff out of the way before I do that.

### Latest WIP ###
BeautyShotSm.png

[su_liam]

Made some progress. Even if this doesn't get me up to speed in time for the comp I think the world and terrain building I've done should pay off in my work conworlding Kazh. The dark band around the equator is roughly the tropical areas. This was determined by setting a lower threshold on a very primitive temperature model. Seasonality effects might lead to some monsoonal regions around the middle eastern coast of the major continent that aren't covered by this, but for now this is about as much climate model as I can manage.

The rivers were calculated and vectorized in SagaGIS using a precipitation model at least as primitive as the temperature model and twice as flat-headed as the map projection. Even with a lot of fudging and hand-alteration the deserts are still sprouting way too many rivers for my taste...

Almost all of my analytical and creative work was done in Wilbur and SagaGIS with the last pretty-fication work done in ArcGIS. I figure there's a blog post on that somewhere in my future. The projection is Eckert VI which meets my need for a flat-headed, equal-area projection quite nicely.

Now to labelling.

### Latest WIP ###
MapExportMd.png

[su_liam]

Yet to get to labelling...
I think this is my overall appearance pretty much finalized. I have my deserts, ice and tropics well delineated with some nice textures. Though, honestly I think the tropics texture conflicts with the desert, I don't have time to clip the tropics away from over the desert regions. Something to think about later. I just had to pick a comp that was strictly limited to a month. And over Christmas, no less.

Fortunately, I have the groundwork set for my cities and other labels, so this should be quick. Maybe not quick enough, but quick as squick!

### Latest WIP ###
Kazh.png