Hey everyone!

It's been very long since I did a WIP and thought it would be about time. I'm not sure what will become of this thread exactly and it may well end up more like a workshop kind of thread than anything an actual WIP thread.

So here's what's going on. I'm reworking my Hothachar map almost entirely. The reason for this is that I'm going to create a set of three maps that I'll hang in my living room with red as the main colour. The first one will be a map of the entire world (Hothachar), the second a smaller map of one the kingdoms from that world and the last map will be a city map of the capital of that kingdom.

I'm keeping only some of the elements that I liked and scrapping everything else. I didn't like how the world consisted of 5 similar sized continents and the whole layout didn't make a lot of sense to me. The old map was also drawn in a equirectangular projection that didn't translate well to a globe (or any other projection really...) at all. I've tried a couple of times to change the coastlines near the poles to make them look better when projected on a globe, without any success.

So last week I decided to start over from scratch and only keep the parts that I wanted to or already had some background written down. So I used a mixture of map generators, my perviously created maps, and some of my own ideas to get this new map of Hothachar:

Click image for larger version.  Name: Hothachar Base Map Small.jpg  Views: 80  Size: 532.3 KB  ID: 107551

As you can see, there's not much left of the old Hothachar. I think the world looks a lot more organic in general, and this time it looks great when projected onto a globe!

I was playing around with maptoglobe.com and G.Projector to see how the world looks in different projections and from different angles. As I was doing that I figured I could overlay some crude textures to get an idea of what the world would actually look like and that quickly got out of hand. The result is a complete satellite map of Hothachar:

Click image for larger version.  Name: Hothachar Satellite Map Small.jpg  Views: 170  Size: 1.52 MB  ID: 107552 Click image for larger version.  Name: ezgif.com-optimize.gif  Views: 79  Size: 6.05 MB  ID: 107553

I figure I'll be making changes to this map in the future, but for now I'm actually very happy with how this turned out.

The next step is to make a hand drawn version of this map, most likely in another projection. I'm thinking Miller Cylindrical or Tobler Cylindrical to fit a poster size. I'm not sure about the style for the map yet so I'll be experimenting over the next couple of days.

In the meantime I'd love to hear your thoughts and ideas! Also, I'm really hoping I'll stick to this project for once. I've got way too many abandoned projects around the guild already and I hope this one won't join them.