Hi! The following are reposts from Instagram, but they’ve been supplemented by occasional retrospective sections. In this, I look back on my ideas from the stage I’m currently at in the process, and sometimes critique my ideas and methods.
(Originally posted August 16 2022) The humble beginnings of this world map, adjusted from a simulation made using tectonics.js. Most of the work here was warping the map into a shape I liked in Photoshop, but I also rendered some of the islands in finer detail. (see the black outlines)
Retrospective: tectonics.js, and other tectonic-plate-modeling softwares, are valuable tools for doing worldbuilding, especially if you want to achieve maximum realism. I chose tectonics.js because it doesn’t require any technological knowhow to use – in fact, it operates entirely from the web. However, this comes at the sacrifice of any kind of control over what the final product ends up looking like, except for generating maps over and over until something interesting comes out. Because of this, tectonics.js ended up not being ideal for me. While I had no specific ideas for continent shape or history, I did have specific ideas for cultures and ecosystems – things which are impacted significantly by the geography of the planet. While I could use GPlates to model with more control, I’ve ultimately ended up deciding that precise tectonic history is of less importance to me than a workable present-day map. However, tectonics.js is something that I could see being useful when starting a new project tabula rasa, as it can generate a tectonic history and give you a good jumping off point for present-day mapping.
(Originally posted August 18 2022) The climates are here! Sort of. I decided that I wanted to know the broad climactic layout before getting too deep into the topography. The color scheme used here is pretty much the standard for the Koppen Climate Classification system. Note that this planet has an 18º axial tilt compared to Earth’s 28º, so the climate’s wetter and the equatorial and polar regions are smaller, and don’t line up as well with the prevailing winds or the ocean currents. Once I’ve gotten in the actual topology, these zones will be a lot messier and more natural-looking, but for now, they’re giving me a broad sense of what I’m dealing with.
Also thank you Artifexian for your excellent tutorials on designing realistic climates, ocean currents and wind patterns. I highly recommend them if you are interested in making realistic climate zones for your world (or if you just want a crash course in basic climate science).
Retrospective: I later end up switching from Artifexian’s method of placing climate zones to one with a bit more precision (more on this method when I start using it.) However, I still think Artifexian’s method, while somewhat simplified, is a very good approximation of actual climates. I primarily switch away from it for two reasons – for one, it provides less guidance as to the subtypes of each Köppen climate type; secondly, it’s not very intuitive to try to adapt to planets with features like different obliquity. (However, he does provide guidance for adapting it to hotter and colder planets.) The level of detail I’ll go into later is on par with what he’s currently doing with geology in GPlates – only important if you want to be very accurate.
That’s all for now. Further reuploads will have more posts, as I’m grouping them by the basic map and process I’m using.