[WIP] Please critique the continental landforms

[Master TMO]

It does help, thanks. Part of the cleaning up process on a world involves filling in all those interior seas, but I just hadn't put that work into those particular maps. Doing so won't really fix the issue you point out, of course. But it will look a tiny bit better.

[Master TMO]

Ah, just realized an issue with the color scheme I used in those images, that is probably confusing things - the altitude color scale is relative. White is the highest altitude on the surface. Whether it's 32000 feet, or 10000 feet. So two different maps will have most likely have the same elevation shown as two different colors.

[gwiley]

For myself, I like the 2nd one better. I do not have a problem with the mountain ranges. Earth plate tectonics would have an ancient continent that splits and wanders. And, of course, they "fit" together. But that is here and elsewhere, perhaps different. I would expect more land mass unless it is more of a water world than Earth.

I like the darker colors and that they are different shades. I did not associate it with elevation. Perhaps because you have only a few variations. I would add more shades as the color scheme suggests every place is almost the same. I would add more mountains but I am a tectonics freak.

Two things bother me:
- the color of the oceans - too uniform even though you have depths well done. Your trenches are almost stand alone - usually I think of them as being close to continents.
- the rivers (does this make me an honorary river police?) - at a continental scale, rivers look more straight - yours are too straight for my taste. again, the uniform color bothers me.

Otherwise, the script you are using makes a very nice map.

Regards,
Gary

[Master TMO]

The nice thing about Fractal Terrains is that I can swap out color palettes with the click of a button. And I have a very bad habit of just swapping around schemes and posting maps here with no explanation of what the colors mean.

The primary goal of the script was to try for a more realistic set of mountain ranges, towards the edges of the landmasses rather than in the center where fractal generators tend to put them. The sea is underplayed because it's completely secondary. I am more concerned with the surface. The trenches were, in fact, a completely accidental side-effect of the script. Also, the rivers are standard Fractal Terrains output to show the slope and direction of the land.

The second color scheme was one that I might use for a finished world, since I had put some work into it just to show what a processed version of the script output might look like. The first and third were primarily to show the elevations.

Thanks for your feedback, I appreciate it! I can very easily get carried away with my own ideas, so I like to let other people fact-check me and bring me back to reality occasionally.