Thread: Draesina: My First Attempt at Creating a Map :D

It shows me two hyperlinks that say Attachment 50478 and Attachment 50479. When I click on them they take me to a page that says "Invalid Attachment specified. If you followed a valid link, please notify the administrator."

That's odd. Now I get the error messages too. Oh well. I'll try again. Here goes:

Thanks! These are really useful. I'm working on the coastlines per jbgibson's adivce at the moment. Is there anything I need to know that would affect the way a coastline would look?

Rising sea levels would generate more 'drowned coast' effects - Chesapeake Bay, fjords, maybe marshes. Eddies of surface currents might get you spots of sand sticking out, swoops of beachy inlets. Additional beach can get deposited on the downstream side of islands or headlands. Falling sea level (or up thrust land) could expose sediment dropped while continental shelf was under water, or bare rock not yet sculpted by tides. Water level going up and down gradually over long periods in the right latitudes can get you coral atolls and barrier reefs. Land or sea floor downstream of subduction zones can have extra volcanic activity, as can random hot spots (Yellowstone, Hawaii). I forget just what generates strings of barrier islands like the Gulf of Mexico USA coast, USA's Atlantic coast, the Netherlands.

Spend some time with Wikipedia's Coastal Geography and Coastal Landforms articles, and you'll be itching to find places for dozens more!

That's great. I wasn't sure what exact terms to look up. So this means I should have a general idea of how the currents flow, what kind of rock my coast is made of, and where my rivers are, yes?

Helps if you can, but not everybody does.

Alrighty. I think I'm going to start with the terrain, then add rivers, and then do climate and currents. Then I'll mess with the coastlines. It makes sense in my head to do it that way, at least. Lol

I changed the size of my map to the 1000x500 you've been using, ManofSteel. I like it better, and now I can use that program to get a different perspective as I roll along.

I have a new question now: How should I go about editing terrain? As in, what program is good for that? Are there any tutorials to make the process easier/less daunting?

Oh! I also fixed the tectonic plates. And added some islands, Canadian style, to the northern part of the northeastern continent.

You can't just change the aspect ratio and call it a different projection like that. (There are situations where it can be pulled off though) Map projections cause distortion, and you have to get the right distortion for the right projection.

The distortion caused by Mercator is relatively easy to draw into your map by hand and looks OK aesthetically. Just draw things bigger as you near the poles. Since coastlines tend to have a self similar "factal" shape, you can generally draw without worrying, and get something that looks OK. So you were reasonably OK the way you had it before.

The distortion in Plate Carree (Normal tangent equidistant cylindrical, equirectangular, whatever) is just an east-west stretching, which likewise increases as you near the poles. This is much less attractive than the all directions stretching of Mercator and much more noticeable and much harder to draw into the map. If you draw features without considering this distortion, it means the features themselves will be distorted (looking "pinched" toward the poles) to compensate. For instance, that archipelago north of the "Eurasialike" continent is extremely distorted on the globe the way you've got it on that map.

Here are stereographic projections of the north and south poles to demonstrate.


Both projections are generally avoided for making reference maps these days. Mercator was used extensively in the past, but it was ill suited to the task (it's designed for use in a particular kind of nautical chart). It is well suited to modern "zoomable" web maps though. Plate Carree is good for textures to be put on a UV sphere in computer graphics applications, and it makes it simple to reproject. You should generally avoid it for designing worlds and certainly for making finished maps.

You also have a triple junction exactly at the south pole, and a quadruple junction (Something that just doesn't happen) exactly at the north pole.

Remember that the north and south edges of that map are each just one point. That projection also significantly distorts direction which makes it rather difficult to work out whether boundaries are converging, diverging, or transverse. (No projection is going to let you do this in a simple euclidean way but Equidistant projections are particularly bad.)

Ok. Let me break this down and summarize it a bit so I can understand it a little better.

Projections:
So, Mercator and Equirectangular projections both cause distortion at the poles, however Equirectangular is worse. For creating worlds (as I am doing) I should go for Mercator? Or is there a better projection I should look at? And to compensate for the pinching distortion, I just need to draw bigger towards the poles. Would the perspective tool in Gimp (which I'm using to create this map) be suitable for such things?

Plate junctions:
I forgot to take that into account, the top and bottom being essentially one point. Thanks for showing me that! How would I correct it? Something similar to this?



I did attempt to use the perspective tool on the lower islands and the northern parts of both continents, but only to a small extent, as I wasn't sure what I was doing.