[WIP] Building a world from tectonics onward

[MrBragg]

I went back and redid the precipitation maps (twice, actually) and managed to eliminate most of the arid-hellscape problems of my first iteration. Turned out that a lot of my problems stemmed from not having much overlap between the summer and winter ITCZ positions, so increasing the ITCZ size a bit and pulling it closer to the equator for both seasons helped put rainforests where they should be. If anything it looks like I now have too much Aw, particularly across the middle of the western continent, though maybe this isn't unreasonable. The BWh cropping up right along the coasts of the two northwestern continents also seems a bit odd, but it wasn't clear what the justification would be for adding precipitation in that region. I'm also still contemplating breaking up the Andean range on the eastern of those two continents to allow in more extratropical storm precipitation, but I'm 100% sold on that idea yet.

Precipitation, Jan / July


Climates, take 2

[MrBragg]

Took a break from planet-scale things for a bit to work on a tiny corner of one continent to try and get my head around Wilbur. Definitely still have a lot to learn, but I've finally managed to get results that aren't facially ridiculous, so I'll consider that forward progress

[QED42]

Took a break from planet-scale things for a bit to work on a tiny corner of one continent to try and get my head around Wilbur. Definitely still have a lot to learn, but I've finally managed to get results that aren't facially ridiculous, so I'll consider that forward progress

This looks really cool, what process did you use for this?

[MrBragg]

To resurrect a seemingly dead thread, I've been toying around a bit with topography on the relatively small scale of a few hundreds of km, focusing first on some back arc basins / volcanic arc off the eastern coast of one of my larger continents. I'd say the goal here is "plausibly abstract realism" with a resolution of ~1 km / px, so I'm not necessarily aiming to depict every ridge and valley but hopefully the overall layout of topography and relative heights of things make at least some semblance of sense.

[Harrg]

Nice. It`s looks good. I really love worlds like yours, made in a similar technique

[Ilanthar]

Looking good! Nice level of details.

[MrBragg]

Thanks both of you! Hoping the process gets a little bit faster as I work at it, though we'll see...

[MrBragg]

Hey QED42, sorry I didn't see your post here until now. The process isn't really any special and is kind of an amalgamation of techniques I've seen on here. Basically I start in Gimp by making a few layers of high frequency grayscale noise; for each layer, I set the color levels to be between certain elevations (e.g. 0 - 150 m, 800 - 1000 m, 3700 - 4000 m, etc) and then give each one a layer mask. From there I can paint on the topography I want at each elevation by erasing the mask (using a variety of brushes I've collected), so it's basically a lot of time spent zoomed way in trying to paint features that make some amount of sense. Once I'm happy with how the large and medium scale things look, I read the heighmap into Wilbur for a little erosion and incise flow before sending it back to Gimp for the final color gradient.

Here's the latest piece I'm ~ done with for now.

[Harrg]

I love your results. I see you are using a Wilbur shader for the shading. If you are using Photoshop you can achieve the same effect simply by using a heightmap. But get more control over it.
Copy the heightmap. Create an alpha channel. Insert your heightmap into the alpha channel. Create a new layer. Fill it with gray (half gray is sufficient). Choose filters, lighting effects. Choose endless light. In the settings, set the alpha channel with the height map. Move the sliders as you like. The most important thing is extrusion. In real time, you can extrude your map and make it three-dimensional. Now you can apply techniques to your map that real cartographers use for real maps, like Tom Patterson
https://www.shadedrelief.com/tutorials.html

[Charerg]

Nice to see you're still working on this! I see you've fallen into the rabbit hole of building up realistic-looking topography, and what you've showcased so far looks really great.