Rheia: one final try at ground-up worldbuilding

[L1qu1dN1trog3n]

Brilliant, I like seeing the different ways people interpret tectonic environments when they turn them into actual landforms. Especially the way these orogenies seem to flow and meld together like you're pushing a pile of sand. One of my lecturers said that's actually the most realistic way of thinking about it (particularly for continental collision zones)

Are you thinking of doing bathymetry too? It ended up being an absolute nightmare for me which I'm still not really happy with but maybe someone's found a better way of doing it.

@Harrg 's point about working on the poles is very valid. Its really hard to get even basic shapes looking right without all the effort of projecting, revectorising, editing, reprojecting and so on. Not sure how a distorted pencil would work.

[Tiluchi]

I am very happy to see your progress. I fully support your idea that we need a separate section for nerds who make their own worlds, because. they are often lost in the stream.
I'm very interested in a technical point, how do you draw the polar regions? I understand you are using vector graphics. Save the process, reproject, and then when you're done and you've inverted the map back, do you draw again with a distorted pencil? Is there a quick way to convert polar caps back and forth while still being able to edit layers in Photoshop or Illustrator?

Thanks Harrg! Someone with more technological know-how than me should consider setting up a Discord channel for this sort of thing (or maybe just a CG Discord sub-channel?).

I'm afraid my answer to how polar regions work is rather boring and unsatisfying: I basically just eyeball a topographic map of Earth in an equirectangular projection (I prefer this one from Japan) to get an idea of distortion at the latitudes I'm working at, and then draw my coastlines and topography to reflect the distortion. Once I've made enough progress I upload the map into GPlates for an idea of what it looks like on a sphere, and then adjust the shapes accordingly back in Illustrator. It's definitely an imperfect method and I'm not entirely pleased with how some of my coastlines look near the poles, but I'm not sure what other options there are for vector-based maps. I suppose I could reproject a raster of the map in GProjector, draw the polar areas, re-reproject it, and then trace it in Lightroom, but GProjector only works at up to 7500 x 3750 pixels, while I'm working on a 16000 x 8000 map in Illustrator. At the level of detail I'm working with, that amount of tracing honestly just seems torturous. So for now I'm just doing everything manually, unless anyone has some brilliant technological suggestions.

Brilliant, I like seeing the different ways people interpret tectonic environments when they turn them into actual landforms. Especially the way these orogenies seem to flow and meld together like you're pushing a pile of sand. One of my lecturers said that's actually the most realistic way of thinking about it (particularly for continental collision zones)

Are you thinking of doing bathymetry too? It ended up being an absolute nightmare for me which I'm still not really happy with but maybe someone's found a better way of doing it.

@Harrg 's point about working on the poles is very valid. Its really hard to get even basic shapes looking right without all the effort of projecting, revectorising, editing, reprojecting and so on. Not sure how a distorted pencil would work.

Thanks Nitro! The "pile of sand" analogy is a good one, and one I'll be thinking about as I refine my topography. I don't love some of my zones where different orogenies meet, but that's a good heuristic to keep in mind, especially when there's no direct Earth analogue I can mimic.

At some point in the future I might try and do detailed bathymetry (as geology, including geology of the ocean floor is rather important for my overall worldbuilding concept), but I'll be honest it sounds nightmarish to me too- drawing mid-ocean ridges is way less intuitive for me than drawing mountain belts. I'll probably just do a basic sketch once I'm happy with my land topography, as that will be a useful guide for determining ocean currents and human settlement patterns, among other things.

[Tiluchi]

Posting an update on my map as I've finally got a first draft of the whole world map! Very happy with how this looks so far, which is good since I've spent probably hundreds of hours over the better part of a year working on this, with almost 32,000 separate paths and almost 700,000 points in Illustrator. I'm honestly surprised my computer was able to handle it without totally crashing.



Now that I have a first draft I plan to go through every continent and make some small-to-medium adjustments to the coastlines and topography based on some issues I've noticed as I work on it. In particular I'm not entirely satisfied with the northeastern continent- the subcontinent recently rifted off to the north looks awkwardly rectangular, and the peninsula to the northeast looks kind of weird too. I'm also weighing whether I should have a back-arc basin on the east coast rather than a high Andes-ish plateau; Nitro pointed out in a different thread that back-arc basins tend to form on the west-dipping subduction zones, and that would be a little more fun from a worldbuilding standpoint as well. On the other hand the oceanic crust subducting there is quite young as the mid-ocean ridge is approaching the subduction zone, and my understanding is that back-arc basins usually form when old, cold crust is being subducted. Not sure if any geology knowers here have thoughts on that.

Also any other comments, critiques and suggestions on topography and plate tectonics are welcome! Hoping to have this completely finalized before I move on to climates as going back and fixing things after will be a huge pain.