Plausible geographical world map

[Maxicus]

Greetings to all readers.

I have recently chosen worldbuilding as a hobby and have been playing around with some Map making software such as Wonderdraft, Nortantis, and Azgaar. however, these applications don't really consider the realism of plate tectonics, continental drift, and all the other yummy things of a realistic geolographical world. So I took 4 random generated maps using Nortantis and made this one.





So, Apart from knowing that this map will look horrible on a globe as it will distort the polar regions...
How plausible would it be that plate tectonics and continental drift would create landmasses such as this? please ignore the mountains and only consider the lands masses and shapes.

[ZeniaMaps]

As far as plate tectonic movements go, you can pretty much use any random shape as a continent and make up for it afterwards. If you do not count mountains and projection to a sphere, all of these maps can be plausible for sure. You can always create a lore to justify any weird looking landmass afterwards if you feel like it. By the way, I believe the program you used has programmed in a way that takes account the tectonic plate movements to a degree. They are not looking completely random, the continents look like they were seperated from a supercontinent and drifted apart, which makes them more realistic. Some of the island formations looks like volcanic islands as well.

So yeah. I think any of these 4 could be used as a base for a plausible world.

[Maxicus]

As far as plate tectonic movements go, you can pretty much use any random shape as a continent and make up for it afterwards. If you do not count mountains and projection to a sphere, all of these maps can be plausible for sure. You can always create a lore to justify any weird looking landmass afterwards if you feel like it. By the way, I believe the program you used has programmed in a way that takes account the tectonic plate movements to a degree. They are not looking completely random, the continents look like they were seperated from a supercontinent and drifted apart, which makes them more realistic. Some of the island formations looks like volcanic islands as well.

So yeah. I think any of these 4 could be used as a base for a plausible world.

Thanks for the reply, my intentions are to take all 4 maps and combine them into 1 large map.

The Plan would then be to:
1. Remove a few islands and tidy up the map.
2. Work on the polar regions to accommodate a map to globe appearance.
3. Then identify plate tectonics and include volcanoes and mountain ranges.
4. lastly I will determine climate zones.
Think I have that right.

[chateauferret]

I quite like the results that some of these flat-world tectonics programs produce, like Nortantis and WorldEngine, but they do fall down because they operate on a finite flat plane instead of a sphere - or rather, since they roll over opposite pairs of edges, they work on a torus. It occurs to me that one way of partly dealing with this is to consider a spherical cube, i.e. a cube whose six faces are projected onto the surface of a sphere, and to generate a "world" which is four times as wide as it is high; e.g. 4096 x 1024. Map that to four consecutive faces of the cubic sphere, either around the equator or around both poles; you are then in the business of merely filling in the other two faces, one of which will possibly be ocean; you might also have to move some bits around so that the bits that wrapped around over the long edges of the map are in sensible places.

[Maxicus]

I quite like the results that some of these flat-world tectonics programs produce, like Nortantis and WorldEngine, but they do fall down because they operate on a finite flat plane instead of a sphere - or rather, since they roll over opposite pairs of edges, they work on a torus. It occurs to me that one way of partly dealing with this is to consider a spherical cube, i.e. a cube whose six faces are projected onto the surface of a sphere, and to generate a "world" which is four times as wide as it is high; e.g. 4096 x 1024. Map that to four consecutive faces of the cubic sphere, either around the equator or around both poles; you are then in the business of merely filling in the other two faces, one of which will possibly be ocean; you might also have to move some bits around so that the bits that wrapped around over the long edges of the map are in sensible places.

That is actually a very good method to try out.

[chateauferret]

That is actually a very good method to try out.

Well I tried it out and it didn't work very well

It looks as if Platec (which produces the tectonics WorldEngine uses) doesn't like it if the grid isn't square. It generates a "world" on the torus as you expect, but the grid seems to be stretched to fit into the dimensions you give it. Now the 4096 x 1024 world isn't just a stretched version of the square (1024 x 1024) one, but it looks stretched in the x direction; the coastlines are quite angular and square, and there aren't enough mountains.

Now WorldEngine does a nice job of enhancing the Platec tectonics into a more mature map using fractal and erosion algorithms, and the square output looks mostly very nice, you might need to tinker with some of the island chains and things to make them a bit less square and so on. But to make a spheroidal planet out of it looks more like a case of generating six tiles (not necessarily all with the same settings) and chopping them around to arrange the continents and other features. I foresee two challenges: firstly, getting the results to join up, you would need to produce content over the joins to get rid of discontinuities; and secondly, you could lose global-scale tectonic features such as coastlines matching up on opposite sides of an ocean.

Oh well.

[Maxicus]

Well, I actually did some playing around. and did this:

created a plane equatorial map indicating longitude and latitude cells using Excel.


generated a few maps using Nortantis and placed imported them into my excel sheet.


For the Pole, I generated another map using Nortantis, imported it into photoshop - Filter - Distort - Polar coordinates - Polar to rectangular. and applied to the excel map sheet.


Once I did that, I applied the map to "map to globe" (https://www.maptoglobe.com/)



Now I can work with the map to make it appear natural and place the plates using photoshop.