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Thread: Eleven years and Counting...

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  1. #3
    Community Leader Facebook Connected Ascension's Avatar
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    Well, first off, the big detailed landmass look good. The other maps show the first obstacle we as mappers have to overcome...thinking outside the box. Sounds cliche but sometimes it's true. The first map with the colored ocean shows the main gist of the problem...fitting a world map to one piece of paper. If you look at the left side all three landmasses line up according to the left side of the paper and they also do the same, roughly, across the top. The first line drawing shows top, right, and left alignment. The second has left alignment but getting better. The last map has a tiny bit of right alignment and some top alignment but the continents seem random enough but are too close together. The other thing folks don't know is that for this kind of flat projection the width will be twice the height so the standard piece of paper has to be blocked off to 5.5 by 11. On flat projections people also forget that the poles take up quite a bit of space thus squeezing the continents into the middle, making them smaller but spaced more apart...remember that our planet is mostly water. Now, of course, you're world could be mostly land so you can throw that bit out if you want but I generally heed it.

    Next, deserts form (here on earth) at the Tropic of Cancer and Capricorn. So if you have deserts all over your continent might be rather small or you need to adjust where the deserts are. If you only have one desert then you can either place the continent above or below the equator. So what I would do is draw each continent on its own sheet of paper - keeping the alignment bias in mind. Draw a big continent, a small one, and some medium ones. Don't draw in climates just yet just the landmasses. Then stick them all together in a way that pleases you without clumping them together. Then do the climates. If you really want to be obsessive then you can spend a long time researching and plotting the tectonics but it's really not worth it in my opinion...so long as you don't have a bunch of mountains going this way and that all over the place - just keep one or two main mountains chains on each continent. Getting a natural-looking world can be difficult at first but you have the basics down; just need some refining and schooling...and that's what we're here for

    Overall, I'd take the last map and spread things out a lot more and take out one continent and put the detailed one in its place. But, then, I do everything by gut feeling and not by science...I know the science I'm just not fanatic about it.
    Last edited by Ascension; 08-21-2010 at 06:01 PM.
    If the radiance of a thousand suns was to burst at once into the sky, that would be like the splendor of the Mighty One...I am become Death, the Shatterer of worlds.
    -J. Robert Oppenheimer (father of the atom bomb) alluding to The Bhagavad Gita (Chapter 11, Verse 32)


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