[WIP] World of Aduhr

[Charerg]

Wow - amazing as always. I can really picture Aduhr as a real place. Do you make the elevation in raster or vector?

It's a raster.

[Pixie]

Those inner mountainranges still seem too pronounced to me, and that seems more of an issue than their overall altitude, which is fine. But this is me nitpicking, and you know how I can nitpick - fortunately, I can also deal with being ignored, so don't you worry too much.

On your previous work on climate, most of the area in Central Eocidar is desertic, right? Which makes those lakes perfect candidates for huge below sea-level salt pans

[Charerg]

Those inner mountainranges still seem too pronounced to me, and that seems more of an issue than their overall altitude, which is fine. But this is me nitpicking, and you know how I can nitpick - fortunately, I can also deal with being ignored, so don't you worry too much.

On your previous work on climate, most of the area in Central Eocidar is desertic, right? Which makes those lakes perfect candidates for huge below sea-level salt pans

That's a good point, and I'll definitely flatten things out further by lifting the elevations around the plateau, especially in the interior, though the eastern flank will probably remain relatively steep. That said, the overall prominence of the mountains is also a part of the working process to a degree: it's a lot easier to create those ancient ranges (with my greyscale technique at least) if you "start out big" and figure out the grain of the mountain ranges, arranging the fold belts in a way that makes sense relative to the direction of stress in the collision. Then you can start adding in erosion and flattening things out.

Though overall the eastern Pan-Eocidarian mountains are probably going to be relatively tall for their age, something akin to the Central Asian Orogenic Belt (which is notably taller than the Appalachians or the Urals despite similar ages).

And you're spot on about those large lakes (well, they're going to lose ~80% of their area eventually due to evaporation), the western portion of Central Eocidar is bound to be extremely arid. A vast salt desert around those depressions is exactly what I had in mind .

Edit:
Also, I guess I might post my progress, though there's not a lot to show. Still fiddling with that plateau, for the moment it's been uplifted a bit, especially in the central region.

[Charerg]

Once again, time has been slipping by with relatively limited progress on Aduhr. I've been a bit busy with irl stuff, so working on the map has been fairly sporadic activity. That said, now that I have a few weeks off, I've been able to sink more hours into mapping and get some actual progress done.

Still not quite done with the low res of the southern portion of Central Eocidar, but I feel I'm finally getting there. At long last, I managed to wrestle that plateau into shape which I'm fairly happy with. Here's the current state:



I also made some experiments with the older Akanrian highlands visible here, some of which may be partially implemented eventually.

[Eldresh]

I've been really enjoying watching your progress with this map! You put a lot of time and detail into it and it really shows.

[Charerg]

I finally finished the low-res map of (southern) Central Eocidar and scaled up to final resolution. Here are the maps:

Azel elevations:


Char elevations:


Gradual:


I haven't started to modify these beyound the Wilbur stage, so there are still a few left-overs like the river connecting the endorheic basins to the oceans (necessary for Wilbur to work out the river flows correctly), and also basically all the 0-50 m terrain has been filled up by the precipiton erosion (that tends to happen, especially with the low-res maps).

However, there shouldn't be anything too major left to do in the high-res stage, mainly just small adjustments and details. So hopefully I won't spend half a year working on the high-res version (damn it feels good to finally have that low-res finished, took waaaaaay longer than I initially planned).

[Eldresh]

This is really starting to come together. Yeah its a little rough right now, but that's what the high-res stage is for. What really stands out for me is the way the mountains in the middle wrap around into that curve as they change directions a bit; it can be headache-inducing to get right, but it really looks like it flows naturally.

[Charerg]

Once again, it’s been a good while since the latest update. With the elevation map, I decided to postpone work with the high res map of Central Eocidar, and instead expanded the area I'm working on to include all of C. Eocidar, since that makes for a more natural boundary in terms of drainage basins. I’ve also done some work on updating the tectonics as well as the coastlines of some continents, so I’ve been sort of working on three things.

As there’s been some interest in a more in-depth look at how to produce the elevation maps, I thought I’d post one technique I use that is a relatively quick way of creating a reasonably detailed height map. For this, I’m going to work on the large island east of Eocidar that keeps switching its name (at present it’s called Dealenos).


For this technique, it’s crucial to have an established scale explaining what each RGB value corresponds to in terms of elevation. In my case, the scale goes in 25 m intervals (though now that I’m using Gimp 2.10 I could use a more detailed 16-bit scale, I’ve decided to stick to my old 8-bit scale for now).

• 0 RGB: -150 m
  1 RGB: -125 m
  2 RGB: -100 m
  ...
  6 RBG: 0 m
  ...
  255 RGB: 6225 m

The basic idea is to generate clouds and then tailor them to represent specific elevations, which are then painted onto the map, starting from low elevation and moving upwards from there. So Filters->Render->Clouds->Plasma (or whatever method of generating random clouds you prefer) and create some clouds.


Next up, desaturate the cloud (Colours->Desaturate->Desaturate) and scale them to represent the lowest elevation levels with Colours-Levels. Since I want this layer to correspond to elevations between 0 and 150 metres, I’ll set up the output to 6 RGB min and 12 RGB max.


Then set the layer mode to Lighten Only and add a black layer mask (making the layer fully transparent). Pick a nice cloud brush or scatter brush (the exact settings and opacity are at your discretion) and start erasing the mask.


Once you’re happy you can apply the layer mask and optionally add a “Land Mask” so you don’t end up painting over the ocean (which you probably don’t want to do).


Then you can apply the land mask and merge your new layer down. Now might be a good time to check how the map looks like converted into coloured elevation:


From this point onwards, it’s essentially rinse-and-repeat with progressively higher elevation levels. Remember that you can always re-generate layers as necessary (or modify them individually, if you create an actual layer stack instead of keeping everything merged into one layer, which is an alternative method), as well as manually paint and blur the elevations as necessary. I tend to mix the various techniques pretty freely. If you wanted to quickly create the elevations for a large area, you could work on an entire continent (or even a world) at the same time, and progressively add layer after layer with increasingly higher elevations to quickly create a reasonably good height map while still maintaining a much better level of control than if you were to simply generate some clouds and use those straight up as the de-facto elevation map.

Here’s my island after adding the next two layers (150 to 300 and 300 to 450 metres), as well as some manual modifications (blurring things together and so forth).


And after yet another two layers (this time I increased the interval: 450 to 600 and 600 to 900), and of course further blurring and other minor modifications.


(At about this point I realised I had my eraser tool set to use the “hard edge” setting . And here I was wondering why things seemed so jagged and required quite a bit of manual blurring. Whoopsie…)

And after the layers 900 to 1200 and 1200 to 1500:


With the base topography more-or-less done I switched into manual modification with just smooth brush for the most part, lowering areas here and there, making the ridges of some mountain ranges sharper, lifting some areas up and so forth. This is what I ended up with (perhaps not quite final, but close).


Hopefully this gave some insight and ideas if you’re struggling with creating your own fictional elevation maps. I figure I might as well use this post for something of an update on my progress with Aduhr as well.


So, here’s how the low-res map of Central Eocidar looks at present, with the western margins largely done. The red line denotes the northern boundary of the area I’m working on, bounded by the northern arm of the Trans-Eocidarian rift as well as the Neyhra Trough (an aulacogen).


As a bit of a sneak peek into the updated tectonic model, here’s this region of Eocidar at c. 100 Mya, when Dealenos and the northern landmass of Neraduhr begin to diverge from Eocidar.


Some of the coastlines are still fairly WIP in the above (as I mentioned I’m reworking quite a few of them). Here’s how the situation looks like around 75 Mya, close to when the ridge between Dealenos and Eocidar becomes extinct.


So, that’s it for this update. There’s more to come in the hopefully not-so-far-away future. Feel free to ask any questions/provide feedback and have a mappy February!

[Charerg]

Well, rather more time has passed than I planned for this to take, but I've finally managed to finish the low-res map of Central Eocidar. As mentioned in my previous post, I decided to cover the whole area rather than just the southern half. Central Eocidar in general was a relatively ill-defined area and has been somewhat problematic in the past as well, when it comes to the details of the topography. It took me a long while to come up with something I'm happy with, but now that the layout has finally been ironed out, hopefully doing the high-res map will prove to be less troublesome.

Here's the low-res upscaled in resolution and almost straight out of Wilbur:





As usual, feedback is welcome, and hopefully the next update will come up bit sooner than half a year from now !

[Charerg]

Ok, time for another update (it seems I make these on a roughly biannual schedule). I finished up the elevations for Central Eocidar, here are the results.

Elevations:


And something of an unusual gradient (this is the "Tropical Colours" shipped with GIMP) along with bump mapping, as a bit of a test:


So, after a rather longish process I finally managed to get that portion of the map done. In hindsight, I think skipping the initial low-res stage was probably a mistake, the process really could have benefited from more concepting, in terms of spending less time revisioning the layout in the mid-res stage. Also, I guess I probably spent more time fiddling with all the minor details than I really should have, given that this took me roughly two years, whereas the previous segment (Akanrias) was done in a month! Oh well, it's a much bigger area than Akanrias as well I guess.

Anyway, with Central Eocidar now complete, that's 2/3 of the continent done, only leaving the final segment (Menorias) before the whole continent is finished! Although I might also sculpt the elevations for the polar landmasses before moving on to the climate phase (my plan being to first build the elevations, then the climates, on a continent-by-continent basis). However, before I get started with that, I'll post some extra content about Central Eocidar (tectonic boundaries, average elevations etc.) and I might even make a general tectonic update.

Hope you like the maps and looking forward to any feedback!