[WIP] Nalia (aka The Anomaly)

[birbs]

Starting on a world map for a fictional planet. A bit of lore: this is a mysterious planet that suddenly appeared in the solar system one day in 2050, shooting Mars out of its orbit and essentially replacing it. Several expeditions were made to the strange planet, dubbed "The Anomaly", discovering that it had once been inhabited by humans (or at least, something that looked very much like humans), though now it was a frozen and barren wasteland. Over the next several years people mapped out both the geography and the history of the planet as best they could. After a lot of effort deciphering the languages found there, and some extremely fortuitous discoveries, the true name of the planet was eventually learned. Nalia.

I currently have the coast outline done. I plan to add topography and rivers and stuff to it later. I also want to make a couple of different versions showing different things. A realistic satellite map, a theoretical map for what the climate/biomes may have been before the planet was frozen over, a map showing past tectonic activity (the planet is no longer geologically active), the ranges of known cultures/countries, sites of historical interest, and maybe some other things when I think of them. I also want to make a couple of regional maps supposed to be made by inhabitants of the world.

A tough task, since I've never gotten a world map past the topographic stage before. But there's always a first time.

Equirectangular:


Global:

[Levtrona]

Wow, just wow. Let us know how this is going. Looks great already.

[Eowyn Cwper]

Hello birbs! That's a very interesting project, are you going to flesh out the languages for this world? I should assume so if you really are birbs from ConWorkShop. ^^ Looking forward to see your progress!

[birbs]

Thanks guys! And yes that's me! The languages in this world are the ones I've been posting about on my CWS thread, so you'll see them develop too I guess. I'll definitely keep updating here but no promises as to the speed. I tend to be pretty slow working on projects.

[birbs]

Okay, I've done a rough tectonic map for Nalia. The idea is that, since Nalia is a geologically dead planet, determining the extent of old tectonics is harder than on Earth, since people don't have earthquakes or GPS data to go off, and can only make educated guesses based off geographical features. The difficulty is compounded by the distance of Nalia from Earth, and the fact that it is completely frozen over, making underwater terrain difficult to discern. So I'm probably not gonna do a much more detailed one than this.


The blue borders are divergent boundaries, red ones are convergent boundaries, and black ones are transform boundaries. Dotted lines are theoretical boundaries, but there is not enough evidence to really say for sure.

Having the tectonics done, though, now means I can start placing elevation in a way that makes some sense. The big black dots in the ocean are where I'm gonna put some more islands.


This is just a super super super rough draft. I'm going to be experimenting with a different way of doing topographic stuff than I usually do, which will hopefully save time and make a better result. But it could also be a complete disaster so don't hold your breath lol.

(If there's anything about this that screams out that it makes no sense please let me know lol.)

[birbs]

Okay, I've been doing some experimenting trying to figure out the best way to achieve what I'm going for, and I think I've found a workflow that works pretty well. I'm going to be doing it region by region, as all my editing programs crash whenever I try to do the whole map at the resolution I want it. I'll put them all together at the end, to minimize hassle.

Here's the first region I've been working on.


So, I've got a realistic-as-I-can-possibly-make-it heightmap, and a more simplified elevation map. Obviously there are still some issues here and things that need to be tweaked (and I haven't done anything with the islands yet), but I'm quite pleased with the result so far.

Any criticism or feedback is welcome.

[birbs]

I've been working on making some procedural heightmapping tools in Houdini because I'm lazy and don't like doing things by hand. So far I've got a tool for making simple mountain ranges and a tool for rivers.

Here's a test piece, also using Houdini's erosion tool which is pretty neat. I think it looks good, and should still work well scaled up as soon as I can get a better computer that doesn't crash every five seconds. So I'm gonna work more on the mountain range tool and give it more features, then I'll work on some other things, like plateaus and volcanoes and stuff.
I've also figured out a way to use Blender to make a world map without worrying about polar distortion which I'm super stoked about.

Also, I'm doing away with tectonics. Mostly I'm not happy with where it keeps saying the islands should be, and also, it's an alien planet. It doesn't need to follow Earth geography. So I'm doing something a little more inspired by Io, one of Jupiter's moons, since Nalia was originally a moon itself before the "anomaly" happened. Io's got some pretty cool geography, and I think it'll look even better when eroded down by wind and water on a habitable planet.