[WIP] Hand-drawn (in photoshop) map. Critique wanted!

[NethanielShade]

Hello Guild! This is my first post, and as a long-time lurker of this site I am glad to finally be making one! What you see here is a world map of my world, named Niremu, that I'm worldbuilding for a book I'm writing. The entire terrain map is hand-drawn by me using a wacom intuos in photoshop. I have a bunch of other layers, some I will share here, some I won't (yet) due to being unfinished. The terrain map is about 11 out of the so far 26 layers. I also have some other variants:

Full Imgur Album Link


Terrain Map


+Ocean Currents, + Wind Currents


+Lat/Lon Grid


+Tectonic Plates & Vectors


Any and all critique is very welcome! If you notice any glaring issues, or even just slight issues, please let me know! I'm trying to get it as realistic as is reasonable before I start adding fantasy flare. I'm also still working on the climates layers. Some are finished, but not all of them, and so far it's been the most time-consuming part of the process. I have plans for even more layers in the future, but I wanted to share my progress and beg for some critique while I'm still early in the process just in case there's something major I haven't caught yet.

[NethanielShade]

I followed Artifexian's Fantasy Map Climate Tutorials on YouTube, and I'm not 100% sure if I did everything right or not. As much as I love Artifexian's videos, his tutorials were kinda bad due to the simple fact that the map he used for the examples was terrible for his own tutorial. Basically every other climate in his tutorial he said "Well, my map is an exception, so I have to do it differently." Lol. Regardless, here's my climates on the map!

Critiques welcome, as always.

Climate Map


Climate Legend


Climates Transparent


Climates, Grid, & Currents

[NethanielShade]

Click here for a gif of the globe.

Globe + My own Grid

Globe + My Grid + Map to Globe's Grid


The map looks really good on a globe! When I started making it, I made it with globe distortions in mind, on an equirectangular projection. I knew that stuff up in the north would be bigger on the map than in reality. Quite happy with how it's turned out, so far! Also, my own grid lines up with Map To Globe's grid, I'm quite proud of that!

South Pole Globe


Though I am a bit surprised by how small the poles are, it looks like my south pole is quite a bit smaller than Antarctica. Oh well, I calculated the albedo of the planet with Artifexian's tutorial, using the surface area of every climate, and used that to calculate the planet's temperature. A nice safe 15C.

Next step is to color the green terrain based on biome (like sandy in desert areas). Then, I'll be sprinkling around some magical landscapes. It's a fantasy world, and there are definitely some areas that can't exist naturally without magic. I just wanted to get all the actual realistic parts down first, before adding in magic stuff. After that, it's on to nation-building, making borders for all the kingdoms and stuff.

[KaiAeon]

Oh, this looks good!

[Arimel]

This is looking really good. I have watched those videos of artefexians but never gone through his process so I never registered any of the problems that his own continent had with the process. When I did this I followed azelor's tutorials which, I believe, were a bit more in depth (a lot of it went over my head!).

The globe is looking fantastic though. I will need to try that with my own world some day. (sorry that I don't have any critiques though - I guess that is a good thing though)

[NethanielShade]

Huge update time! I've done a LOT since I've last posted. The first and most obvious change to my map from last time is that I've colored the surface in accordance to climates. Grass, sand, etc, is different colored based on the climate. Some are more obvious than others, but it looks a looooot better than everything being the same green, in my opinion. In addition, I've also finally added rivers! These are just the major river systems, not every river in the world. Any local/regional maps I do in the future will have more detailed river systems.

Link to the full Imgur Album.

Surface Map


Next up is the same exact image, but with contour lines! Now changes in elevation are more obvious, though it is incredibly noisy.

Surface Map with Contours


Next we have Ley Lines! A bit of fantasy, so sorry for anyone who's here for scientific purism.

Surface Map with Ley Lines


If anyone is interested in seeing any of the previous layers, like wind currents, ocean currents, world grid, etc. with the new colored surface, let me know and I'll be happy to post. Just didn't want to flood this post with a million separate images.

I have a bunch of WIP layers, like resource placements for the ocean (fishing hotspots and reefs), resource placements for land (like location of mines for metals like iron, or non-metals like coal, and also fantasy magical metals, etc.), and I'm about to start FINALLY working on national borders. My world map will have kingdoms soon!

[NethanielShade]

Hey there, Guild! Another update! And it's only been 3 days, not 4 months!!!

Link to the full album of this update.

First, we have volcanic hotspots! OH BOY! I am not happy with myself. I procrastinated (and forgot) about volcanoes and did this way, way too late into the project. Because of this, I had to add some new, smaller mountain chains of volcanoes, which caused me to have to re-do the land elevation in those areas, and completely re-do the contours I just finished a few days ago! Completely re-do them! The only bright side to it all is that the new contours have absolutely no feathering, and are much, much cleaner, not that it's easy to tell unless you have the ability to zoom in clearly on the image. Either way, here's the pictures:

Volcanic Hotspot locations.


Volcanic Hotspots + Plate Boundaries.


Volcanic Hotspots + Contours.


I would also like to mention this: These are major volcano locations, hotspots enough to cause mountain chains. These are not the locations of every volcano on the planet. For the same reason as rivers, I am not going to make the location of thousands of volcanoes on the map. Also, you may have noticed looking at past images, but all the mountain chains on my world seem newer, there are no very old mountain chains. That's because of the creation of the world. Even though I'm taking pains to make it very scientifically accurate, it's funny, because I don't want the creation of the world to be scientifically accurate. It was created by magic, not a big bang. The world itself is probably only like, a million or so years old? Maybe half? Not billions. Because of this, there are no 65-million-year-old dinosaur fossils. There are 500-million-year-old mountain chains like the Appalachians. There are no oil/petroleum deposits, because those take millions of years to form. Coal exists because it takes roughly 12,000-60,000 years to form, but it's rarer than it is in our world. But there are also plenty of fantasy/magical alternatives. But I digress, you're here for cool maps, not for worldbuilding information, probably.

Next up, I went back to Artifexian's tutorial on Ocean Currents, because it has some rough information on ocean resources like reefs and fishing hotspots. I'm not super interested in going into too much detail on ocean resources at this stage, but fishing hotspots will be important to do before I get to political maps. Reefs will just be a rough 'possible reef locations' because reefs will only really matter on local maps. Regardless, here they are:

Ocean Currents + Rough Warm & Cool Coastal Regions.


Ocean Currents + Rough Fishing Hotspot (cyan), Possible Reefs (yellow), and ENSO Event (blue) Locations.


Top Two Combined.


Next Goal: Inland Resource Placement. Oceanic resource placement was less important so I just did rough areas, mainly fishing hotspots. Reefs only really matter on local maps. But Inland Resource Placement, like major ore deposits and stuff, is more complicated and annoying. But once that is done, I'll FINALLY, FINALLY get started on the borders/political map!