Quote Originally Posted by kacey View Post
Wow, this has come along way since I last checked and I'm just about to dive in to you're tutorial but I wanted to ask a question before I start, I hope that's ok.

I've decided against my better judgement that I'm going to start with a Pangea type continent and break it up. Right now I have the basic land mass setup and the locations of major cratons and weak spots where old mountains ranges used to be, I don't know how they got there or why but that's where I'm going to start. I also have some key areas set up where subduction is going to start to pull it all apart, an ancient ring of fire so to speak, I just have to draw up the plates as they are now a little more clearly then I'll be ready to go but all the G.Plates tutorials I've found start with present day and I really don't want to go backwards...

So how to get my land mass into G.Plates at an earlier date? I would like to start back in time and see where the continents go so I have no idea what the present day situation would look like. Is there an easy way to do this? Or do I need to know where the continents will eventually end up before hand?

Sorry if this has already been asked I haven't gone over the whole thread yet just skimmed through it a little.
You can just follow the normal procedure, it shouldn't be too problematic. You can import the raster image of your Pangaea, then draw the continents based on that just like you would when starting with the present date arrangement. The only major problem is that some features won't work properly with non-zero 0 Mya pole. Like I mentioned, it should be possible to circumvent that limitation by treating another date (say, 10 Mya) as the "present day".

As an example, if you were to start from 200 Mya, your rotation file for one plate could look something like this:

0 Mya: Zero
10 Mya: Final position
50 Mya: Intermediate position
100 Mya: Intermediate position
150 Mya: Intermediate position
200 Mya: Zero (Starting position)

Let me know how it goes (I might consider adding an extra section to the tutorial about starting from Pangaea if it's too difficult based on the instructions so far).