World building using ArcGIS

[loogie]

Nothing better then using 20000 software for your roleplaying needs.
Sorry for the lack of pictures or screen shots at the moment, but i'm at school and don't have the project here

As i've stated in other threads, i'm in the process of creating a new realm.. start of which, i'm creating a world... Right now, i've come up with some basics for the mainland, and am planning to use ArcGIS to add the features in the world, so that they are geographically sound. I don't know how much everyone knows about Geomatics and analysis here in the guild, so i'll try to expain what I can...

First, to make most of my ideas work, i need to start with a DEM or Digital Elevation Model... what i've used for this is something people are firmiliar with here... Bryce... more admittedly I'm a novice at bryce, so i used photoshop to create a bump map, and added it into a bryce terrain... which i then exported as a USGS DEM. Playing around with the values so they made sense, i did things like added erosion, noise, smoothed etc... and the final product looks pretty good.

From there i imported it into ArcGIS as a raster. from here i can make contours and such, which i did, and found out that where the land meets the ocean (grey meets black) the countours were very square and ugly.. the contour above that looked quite good, so i preformed a calculation to lower the raster by 100.. (subtract 100 from the values)

after this, i had to make a polygon of the landmass (using the rasters contour) and made it a raster, then preformed multiply with the lowered raster (basically, the polygon raster had a value of 1 for land, 0 or everything else... and when multiplied with the lowered raster, it ends up with all the same values inside the polygon, and a zero everywhere else... (this is used to subtract everything below 0.

This is all i have done so far, but i have various plans for other things.

Rivers and watersheds
ESRI has a nice hydrology setup, which can allow me to find out what direction water will flow on every pixel in the raster... from that information we can then find where water would gather and run (rivers) on the entire raster... and when you give a point anywhere on the raster, you can extrapolate the watershed that point would fall under... this means i can create rivers on the world, using the DEM, instead of guess where they should be.

Climate
Climate is a bit more tricky, and has to start with placing points around the map with temperatures... A bit of guesswork here, and will be as detailed as you want to make it... but remember this is a fake place, so any "errors" don't have to be errors at all... from the points you can interpolate into a raster, and create a base climate for your entire map...

Plants and Animals
Plants can be found quite easily, using some simple analysis... basically, start with taking the slope and aspect of the DEM raster.. this gives you the steepness of the land, and the direction it faces... after that, its creativity... decide what your plants require to grow (some other facets and samples like soil types and such may need to be created, much like the temperature, but it is recommended to be more detailed)... with this information like for instance "cliff ferns require Xslope, and have to be south facing, on rocky soil and a temperate climate"... From the rasters we've created, we can preform an analysis to find areas that have all these attributes... giving you the areas this plan would thrive... from ther you can subtract any areas you wish (and add any areas) coming up with your final product... Same goes with animals, but you can also use the plants you create for their survival as well.

from that information, you can more easily create cities and regions, and populate your city in a human sense more completely. I believe using GIS software to figure out all this information is quite usefull, and creates a cohesive product, instead of finding conflicting ideas at a later date due to human error. The main thing to remember, is its fantasy... so nothing is an error, but being a geographer, i like my worlds to be as realistic as possible.

I hope this gives you an idea of what Geomatics and GIS can do for your roleplaying needs (and in the real world) any other ideas and suggestions would be much appreciated!