Programs for Pixies 'Climates, applying Geoff's Cookbook at detail (some)'

[Repporio]

Greetings!

Whenever I do world building I always end up blowing the project out of proportions and start playing around with tectonics, rain patterns and climates.
My favourite tutorial to create ‘realistic’ climates is Pixies; Climates, applying Geoff's Cookbook at detail (some)

A great step by step tutorial to go from an elevation map of a world to a complete climate map with ocean currents and weather patterns.
Though, after having done the latter steps of the tutorial more than a handful of times they start being a tiny bit tedious.
So, here’s two programs to help automate some of the steps. Specifically the heat map and climate map generation. Hopefully this can be of use for you out there who like playing around with climates for your worlds.

Link to programs




Start of tutorial:

Alright, so, two specific things to keep in mind for these tools;

• All images used need to be without an alpha channel. Meaning if you’re using photoshop you need to flatten the image before exporting it. A slight inconvenience that will probably be changed in the future but is much better than the alternative of manually doing the work.
  
• Any projection can be used with this program if the area outside the map area is either completely black or completely white (A.i. 000000 or ffffff).

Also, as I am used to photoshop that is what I will be using to create the files for the tool to use. Although any image editing program should be able to create the files required.

This is the world I will be using the in the tutorial. It’s using a Hammer-Aitoff projection but as stated above it does not matter.



Specifically, I will be using this area in the far east of the landmasses.



Part 1.
In order to start the tutorial, you should have followed Pixies tutorial all the way to step 5. The difference is that you need to add a black background so that it isn’t transparent. When you’re done you should have a rain layer looking something like this.


Rain file for January and Rain file for July


For the program to properly function the specific values for the different rainfall should be:

Name RGB #
Dry (0, 0, 0) #000000
Low (100, 100, 100) #646496
Moderate (161, 161, 212) #a1a1d4
Wet (198, 198, 237) #c6c6ed
Very Wet 1 (220, 220, 248) #dcdcf8
Very Wet 2 (234, 234, 252) #eaeafc
Very Wet 3 (242, 242, 254) #f2f2fe

But this should already be the case if you’ve followed Pixies tutorial. Once you have something like the rain map you should flatten and export it.




Part 2.

For part two you need to bring up Pixies step 6 part one. This part is basically identical except for a few things. For starters you need to create a base layer covering all the map and fill it with the colour #808080 (128, 128, 128).
The layers you create for the different factors need to be filled with the colour #80808 (8, 8, 8) where you want the factor to have an effect. Otherwise it should be transparent as seen in the image below. A very important thing is to make so that all the factors that cools the area (continental influence for example) should be set to the blending mode “subtract”. Any layer that adds to the temperature should be set to “linear dodge (add)”.



I organize these files in a set of folders. A main folder called “Temperature factors” containing 3 folders and the base layer. The three folders are divided into the January factors, the July factors and the both season factors. If you split the files up this way, then it is important that you set the blending mode of the folders to “Pass Through” or the add and subtract will not function.



When the “both season” factors and one of the seasons factors are activated you should have something like this.



You also need a base heat map for the generator to apply the factors upon. Again, follow Pixies tutorial. I made mine by taking a 1:2 image and create the 11 equally large horizonal stripes and filled them with the relevant temperature colours. Afterwards I transformed them to the used projection using a program such as G.Projector (free) or Global Mapper (Other mapping software’s are available). Just make sure that there are no gradient transition between the different temperature levels after transformation as the program is dependent on specific colour codes.

The most important is that you use the following colours for the temperatures.

Name (RGB) #
Extremely Cold (208, 254, 255) #d0feff
Very Cold (48, 104, 152) #306898
Cold (48, 204, 152) #30cc98
Mild (208, 255, 104) #d0ff68
Warm (255, 204, 0) #ffcb00
Hot (255, 52, 0) #ff3400
Very Hot (208, 0, 0) #d00000

For me the world baseline temperature map in January looks like this;



For July you can just flip it upside down. Zooming in on the area I’m using as an example I will have something like this;


January baseline temperature and July baseline temperature


I overlayer the landmass border for reference. Shouldn’t be there in your version. Again, flatten and export.

Now it’s time to use the first generator. Wohoo!

So, the program first asks for a baseline heat map, and will allow you to browse for it on your computer. Once selected, pick the factors file corresponded to the season.



Once you’ve done this for both the seasons, this should be the result.


Heat map output January and Heat map output July


Some lines and transitions may look sharp but as Pixie states, you can stop at any time and fix these to make the transition smoother before continuing. Will make the final product look fancier.




Part 3.

Now for the actual climate generation. This part is very straight forward. For this step you need all files we’ve created so far. The heat and rain maps for both seasons, as well as a map defining the land. This map is purely black and white, where solid black defines land and white defines water.



This is simply a mask which is used to clip the climate map to only show climates where land is.
When you launch the climate generator it will first ask for the black and white base land map, then the temperature map for January, July and then the rain map for January followed by July.



When the images have been selected for the program a command prompt should open and display the progress of the generation.



After this you should have a complete climate map. As you can see some areas are black, they are areas that don’t fulfill any of the climate classifications and have to be filled in by hand.



That concludes the guide. Thanks for the read!
There were enough conditional statements in the program make any man go mad. I think I got them all right in the end but if there is some weird climate in an area that should not be there, then let me know. Might have missed a parenthesis.