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Thread: Theia revisited - Climate check (WIP)

  1. #31
    Guild Member Guild Supporter nwisth's Avatar
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    Cool to hear you're interested in my worldbuilding excel magic, srm038. I might post about it once I finish the reworking of Theia's world climates.

    I've done a complete rework of the pressure and wind systems, taking the large polar ice caps into consideration, and making three strong circular wind systems to gird the globe. Hopefully this makes sense.

    JANUARY WINDS & PRESSURE
    Theia-Equirectangular-WIP-climatetut-winterwinds-v2.jpg

    JULY WINDS & PRESSURE
    Theia-Equirectangular-WIP-climatetut-summerwinds-v2.jpg

    Based on those, I made new precipitation maps. Perhaps my great continental swirls are a bit of a stretch, but they're cool, at least.

    JANUARY PRECIPITATION
    JanPrecip.png

    JULY PRECIPITATION
    JulPrecip.png

    I also reworked the temperature from scratch, paying a lot closer attention to the many, many posts of the tutorial thread. Using layers of 50% grey, set to Screen for colder effects and Multiply for hotter, and masks drawn in pencil, I was able to create a greyscale map under a Gradient Map adjustment layer, set to the correct temperature colors. By adjusting FILL, I could get them to match the colors and get a temperature progression that felt right, corresponding to Azélors tables. In addition to latitude and elevation, I've factored in ice sheet albedo, ring shadow, continental and three types of maritime influences. By adjusting the grey level of the base color, I could adjust everything to fit the general temperature level of my planet, giving me this result:

    JANUARY TEMPERATURE
    JanTemp.png

    JULY TEMPERATURE
    JulTemp.png

    And, after uninstalling GIMP 2.10 and installing GIMP 2.8, I even managed to get the 6-step script to work - producing this awesome climate zome map.

    THEIA KÖPPEN CLIMATE ZONES - second draft
    theia-climates-v3.png


    Now I can adjust and rework to my heart's content. but I'm pretty happynow. I've got deserts, steppes and rainforest where I want them, mediterranean climate in the right spots, and a nice Dfb region for my longship-sailing matriarchic society.

    I see I still have to do some tweaking to get my highland river region out of the same Dfb area, and into something more like Cfb, but hey, I'm super happy to finally have cracked the code, being able to make sense of this.

    -Niels

  2. #32
    Guild Member Guild Supporter nwisth's Avatar
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    Well, it's been another few days, and I haven't been able to put my Theia world map away.

    I wanted new rivers, generated from the precipitation levels - but that turned out to be a lot harder than anticipated. I've tried to get QGIS to work, but r.terragen from GRASS only gave me error messages and SAGA's hydrology modules gave me a few results, but not the ones I wanted. I ended up using WILBUR again, even though I know it doesn't really work well on equirectangular maps. To get a better result than before, I started up After Effects, and generated various layers of fractal noise, which I merged into my height map. I also tried to make some continental lift by cutting the world into the largest tectonic plates and applying various gradients to try and simulate the tilt of, say, continental North America. Setting these layers to SCREEN and adjusting FILL made me able to make a rather nice and detailed height map that made my previously flat and boring continental shelves a new life.

    In the end, after coloring it, my height map looked like this:

    NEW HEIGHT MAP:
    Theia-Equirectangular-WIP-climatetut-heightmap-2.jpg


    I put the greyscale height map into Wilbur, and started generating rivers. I made them simple white lines on a black surface, in two different amounts, and put them back into Photoshop. If I couldn't get the GIS software to generate precipitation-based rivers for me, at least I could do it manually! But first, I needed to know the climates from which they'd flow.

    I used the new height to re-create temperature maps and adjusted the precipitation maps as well, and ran the 6-step climate GIMP-script again, giving me this map:

    KÖPPEN CLIMATES:
    Theia-Equirectangular-WIP-climatetut-climates.jpg


    From this, I painstakingly masked out every separate climate, learning a lot about each from Wikipedia in the process. :)

    Armed with climate masks, and referring to my precipitation maps, I could start tracing rivers. Sure, they are some enormous continent-crossing river systems, but this time, they feel a lot less random. I selected the "short" rivers and expanded the selection with 1 pixel, giving me a base for the larger, main rivers - and kept the "long" rivers at their 1 pixel width. Using the pencil tool and a mask, I could follow the major rivers until they branched off too much, and delete the rivers appearing in dry areas.

    With this done, I could start painting my biomes. I grouped similar climate zones together, and ended up having jungle, savanna, warm desert, cold desert, mediterranean, temperate forest, warm steppe, cold steppe, tundra and permafrost biomes. I based them on the riverless terrain texture from WILBUR, and simply recolored and tweaked before filling in my climate masks. It took quite a bit of re-painting to avoid the hard climate zone breaks, but I think I managed to get a rather pretty end result:

    THEIA - Main World Map:
    Theia-Equirectangular-Biome-nosnow.jpg

    In the end, I made a couple of seasonal variations, to show the shifting sea-ice and the reach of snowy winters.

    THEIA in January:
    Theia-Equirectangular-Biome-Jan.jpg

    THEIA in July:
    Theia-Equirectangular-Biome-Jul.jpg


    So, what has all of this work shown me? That I wasn't very far off with my previous climate guesses, and that I can keep writing as intended. :D

    My next project might be to re-paint my main continent map according to the new climates, and see if I have to adjust my population calculations, or if it's all good.

    Again, I want to say a big thank you to Azélor and Charerg - without your help, scripts and considerable body of work leading up to this, I would have never managed to make this a reality. You guys rock! :D

    -Niels

  3. #33
    Guild Member Guild Supporter nwisth's Avatar
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    Hi! A world map is never really finished, is it? Except for the climates of my main, populated continent, I was never truly happy with my last version - so I've gone through the motions once again.

    I increased the resolution four times, to 24000 x 12000, then remade the height map, creating a lot more interesting and detailed topography - then created new temperature and precipitation maps to match. Finally, I could generate the Köppen zones, then started painting it in imitation of a satellite map. Let me tell you - there's a LOT of forest this time, with more precipitation all around. Unfortunately, the PSB-file is getting rather unwieldy to work with - it's grown to 32 GB in size - so I haven't gotten around to prettying it up for a finished map, with borders and legend and the works.

    What I have done, however, is taking it a step further. I put my new textures into After Effects, using Andrew Kramer's new Orb plugin from VideoCopilot.net.

    So, check it out - :



    (I've never tried embedding a video here before so I hope it works)

    I'm especially happy with how I made the clouds billow, and that I figured out how to make the rings, with shadows and all.

    I hope you like it!

    -Niels

  4. #34
    Guild Artisan Charerg's Avatar
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    Wow, that looks truly amazing! This project has come a very long way, and I can only admire the dedication and the amount of work that you've put in.

    As a climate geek though, I can't help but ask if we can see the revised climate map too . It doesn't have to be the full-res version, ofc, if that's too big for the Guild website.

  5. #35
    Guild Member Guild Supporter nwisth's Avatar
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    Thanks, Charerg!

    I would never have gotten this far without all the help from you guys - it is much appreciated.

    Since you ask, I've eagerly resized a few maps down to 4k x 2k. They don't have legends, but the Köppen map uses the regular color scheme from Wikipedia, so it should be easy to make sense of.

    Topographic map:
    Theia-topographic-map-2x4.jpg

    Köppen climate map:
    Theia-Koppen-map-2x4.jpg

    Satellite map:
    Theia-satmap-2x4.jpg

    There are a lot of climate zones that simply translate to "forest" on the satellite map - with jungle, temperate forest and boreal forest as the three main types. Then there's savannah, steppes and mediterranean, and of course tundra, as the four main non-wooded areas.

    -Niels

  6. #36

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    The maps are cool but you should add transition zones between the different biomes on the satellite map and some variations in the color of the forests and deserts.

  7. #37
    Guild Member Guild Supporter nwisth's Avatar
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    Creating a sat map of a more-or-less pristine world has been a challenge. There are very few places on Earth to rip textures from, since so much of the planet is covered in farmland. I've tried to color match to a certain degree, but there are hardly any temperate forests left to look at. I've also tried to create transition zones by feathering the various climate zone masks, but increasing the feather size beyond what I have done made the map rather blurry and indistinct. As is, it looks pretty horrible at 100% resolution, so I need to head back to the drawing board before I can call this one done. Still, i think it worked pretty well for the globe animation.

    If you have any good examples of satellite-style maps with realistic transition zones and proper color variation within the various biomes I would be very happy to see it. What techniques would you use?

    -Niels

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