Mars Map (redone)

[jshoer]

A suggestion (and your free to take it or leave it or do anything you want with it): if your aim is to make it look like a habitable world with seas and rivers, you might wanna try eroding the landscape a bit before you start colouring it in (Wilbur might help there). At the moment it looks like a parched, pockmarked world someone just dumped a few billion gallons of water on. Everything is filled in nicely, but there's no sign of a history of sedimentation, erosion, ... as you would have in an actual river-and-ocean world.

The scientific consensus at this point is that Mars was once a river-and-ocean world. It does have a history of sedimentation, erosion, and so on. The Mars Science Laboratory Curiosity rover has provided pretty unequivocal evidence for lots of water-influenced features. If Ilanthar used DEM data, then he's got those features already!

I think the issue you're seeing is that those features are difficult to see at the global scale of Ilanthar's map. And, in fact, every time NASA puts out a concept image of Mars in its primordial oceanic state, it looks kind of like a "pockmarked world someone just dumped a few billions gallons of water on."