A World Map of Illion

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Hi everyone!

I'm entirely new here, and on the advices of Caenwyr I decided to make my first post here to share the progress of my worldmap.
To give a bit of background to all of this, two years ago I started working on a personal setting with a friend. The general concept is that the story takes place on a planet named Illion, in the aftermath of the crash of a convoy of spaceship passing by. Stranded on the planet with no means to repair their crashed spaceships the survivors go for the most logical option: survival and establishing settlements to at least survive their first few years on the planet. Fast forwards several centuries and civilisations have flourished on Illion, stemming from the initial crash sites of the various vessels.
Illion itself is a strange planet. It looks like it has hosted intelligent life, as the ruins of former cities/buildings seems to point at, but there is no evidence of where this intelligent life is now. On top of that, the planet showcases a bunch of unnatural features, like water flowing back in the air in some places, or pieces of mountains floating over the ground.

Anyway, that's about it for the introduction. The reason I did it was to give a bit more context as to why some things may not be entirely geologically accurate. I'm still trying to figure out how to represent them properly, but for now let's say that I'm aware of some possible weirdo elements.
So, what happened is that a few months after starting working on that setting, I decided to do a sketch of what that world would look like. It was my first attempt at making a worldmap, and obviously I faced a bunch of issues.



This was the very first map I made. I sketched that on an A4 piece of paper at work, and just went with it without really knowing anything about how relief is formed, or how coastlines are affected by currents, etc. I only started researching that waayyy later.



Very quickly I realised I would not be working on a hand-drawn map. I'm not that skilled, and I also don't have the setup to do that. so I moved to Photoshop rather quickly, using the opportunity given by my school to get access to the CC license for free.



I followed one of the Artifexian tutorial on how to start making maps, and fast forward a few attempts I decided to add a lot of things to the first attempt to make it a bit more interesting visually, and also have an actual diversity of continents to play with. Since the main idea of this setting is to see how people evolve differently over ttime even when stemming from the same initial civilisation. So I played with those tectonic plates a bit. Trying to get to something that would make sense for whatever would come next. I can't find the actual final file but it doesn't really matter.



That was the first "final" map I had. It was made with Photoshop and was meant to serve as a template for everything I would do next. But very quickly I realised working on Photoshop was not my favourite process, for a lot of reason. One of them being that I didn't have a tablet back then, so mapping was painfully inaccurate and slow. I also gave it my first try at understanding how currents work, and how it affects climate. That was also a painful exercise because I feel like I missed a bunch of points, and that was I ended up producing was just broad strokes instead of being somewhat accurate.



That's my first - and only so far - attempt at making a climate map.

To give you a timeline, most of that was done during the summer of 2020. From September 2020 to early 2021 I was working on a regional map. This one was literally the most complex thing I ever created. It was stupidly long because I made so many mistakes. One of them being to start going too much into details by making the map at the 800% zoom level. Since the map was at the max size I could create on Illustrator (14000x7000px if my memory is not betraying me) it was a stupid process. In the meantime I bought a tablet to speed up the process. I also realised my computer was dying from the amount of points I was putting in. I had to refocus on a sub-region of the initial region to give some breathing room to my workstation. The next two images are respectively 1) how far I've been on the initial regional map before it started making my computer die 2) the final subregional map.





That was long, but in the end I was kind of happy with the journey. I learned a lot on the way to that result. As soon as I was done with this regional map I decided it was time to use what I learned to remake the worldmap. I would use the template I made to improve it. I won't show you all the steps, but here is what it looked like after I finished making the oceans, and as of today when I'm slowly reaching the end of the main relief.





So that's where I'm sitting at today. It's been a long process to try and figure out what I liked making. I'm very much influenced by the style of Nate Mangion (Vorropohaiah) as you can see. I really dig it, and as some of my mentors told me: steal other people's styles until you find yours. So for now I'm trying to learn from him and a few other creators before I really find that style that will define my future work :)

Thanks to anyone that will decided to leave feedbacks on my work. I'm sure there is a lot of room for improvement from how my relief is made, to the failed attempts at verisimilitude in some places.
I will also say that if anyone is competent in defining currents and climate, I would really enjoy learning from them as I think it will once again be the next step once the relief is finalised.