Reply With Quote[Edited: See latest post for mountain attemps]
I am a bit unhappy with the land configurations at the minute, as rainforest and desert take up a lot of space. I would have a preferred more mediterranean/temperate or even steppe climates. I guess this is part of letting the dice fall how they may with such maps...! Maybe I will treat this as a practice and try another one. But for now, here is an updated climate map.
Main points are:
The 'subcontinent' in the east of the large eastern landmass now has no desert, with the interior being steppe - as Azelor pointed out, the high pressure zone gets weaker here, and the land is closer to water. I'm still not 100% sure about this though as it is still quite a large landmass and might generate high pressure enough to form a bit of desert.
There is a patch of Cwa bordering the steppe, as the winds blow from the dry steppe in winter, but moisture gets sucked in from the nearby sea in summer. Not sure if this is accurate. The rest transitions from Cfa to Cfb which I think is predictable.
I think the colder climates are now mostly accurate.
If anybody spots anything which looks unlikely/wrong/out of place, please do say so. Thanks!
[Edited: See latest post for mountain attemps]
Last edited by davoush; 11-05-2017 at 07:27 AM.
Try looking at your map in a mercator projection with the top and bottom 15ş removed and it'll look a lot different in terms of tropical-desert-temperate ratiosOriginally Posted by davoush
27,4% , That's the percentage of the surface area covered by deserts in your world. For Earth, Wikipedia tells me it's about a third (33%).
The difference is probably because you don't have a large continent at the South Pole.
As for the rain forests, it doesn't look problematic. Most of Russia and Canada are rainforests. Depends what you meant by rainforest.
@Pixie: Well, that is one way....
@Azelor: Thanks, that puts it into perspective. How did you calculate the area of my desert, if you don't mind me asking? I have been thinking recently about calculating the percentage of land/water to compare with earth.
Edit: According to GIMP's histogram using a black and white Hammer projection, land is 26% and sea is 73.3%, so there is a missing 0.7% (is there a way to make it more accurate?) but I suppose that's close enough. I wanted the land/sea ratio to be more or less like earth's. How did you manage to calculate only the desert?
Last edited by davoush; 11-03-2017 at 07:36 AM.
I selected the desert and divided it by the total mainland area.
The missing part is small. The map become blurry after conversion, some areas were not selected. You also had a black border around the map and some numbers for latitudes.
Thanks Azelor, that makes sense.
[Edit: See next post for updated mountains.]
Last edited by davoush; 11-05-2017 at 07:28 AM.
Still practicing drawing mountains...I think they are getting better, at least the scale seems to be better. This is still very rough, though. Some of the ranges probably don't make sense tectonically, but oh well. My main issue is trying to show a variety of heights of mountain.
It seems quite difficult to indicate an elevated plateau with such a style, especially if I want to label it further down the line.
I never tried my hand at handdrawm, but the general consensus is that it takes time to get any good. My untrained eyes, though, tell me your mountains might be a bit larger than the map asks for. Yet my recommendation goes to enlarging the map (more pixels to work with) and not drawing smaller (so that shortcomings on detail get lost on scale).
There's a fantastic map here at the guild, showing old world trade routes in the middle ages, which I think could work out as a style reference for you...
here it is, I found it!
Thanks Pixie, that's a very nice map and similar to the style that I want. My file is 4690x2480px at the minute, I just upload smaller versions to the board. I imagine this size is large enough for small-but-detailed mountains?
I think a main challenge is finding a scale which shows mountain ranges as clearly mountains when the map is viewed as a whole, but also not exaggeratedly big. I also don't want there to be too much white space, but rivers and labels should help with that.
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