Half of Terran World Map

[waldronate]

Btw - does the Sun hold out that long? Can't remember whether it was 5 million or 5 billion years...

The sun lasts a good 5 billion years more. About a billion years from now, though, Earth becomes uninhabitable as the sun's perpetual increase in brightness drives the inner ege of the habitable zone past Easrth's orbit.

[ravells]

Check out RobA's tutorial on how to build a not-so-random coastline.

This sounds ideal for your purposes since you can start with images of existing continents and by playing with the settings, make detailed coastlines which hold the main forms of the continents but differ in the detail.

You will need to download Gimp (free download) if you have not already got it.

[Xeviat]

I tried following the tutorial in Photoshop, but it wasn't working, even after someone refined it for Photoshop (I'm misunderstanding one of the steps I believe).

[Xeviat]

Thanks. I finally got it to work, but it isn't doing very much for me, since I'm dealing with such a large scale. I did discover that I can trace out the continents and use the Ocean Ripple distortion to create some random coastlines, then find edges to finalize. I'll be fine tuning things, see how it all turns out.

[ravells]

Hmmm, must try that ocean ripple trick. When you say it's a problem of scale, do you mean that your document is at too high a resolution for the cloud filters to give the effect?

[Xeviat]

Hmmm, must try that ocean ripple trick. When you say it's a problem of scale, do you mean that your document is at too high a resolution for the cloud filters to give the effect?

No matter what resolution I try, the cloud details are just too big. I figured out a workaround; I fill the whole layer with the clouds, then use transform to scale the selection down to 1/4th, then tile it. GIMP allows you to play with the detail of clouds, but I can't find a way to do it in Photoshop.

The ocean ripple trick is only good for islands I found; it makes continents too uniform in their randomness ... as oxymoronic as that sounds.

[ravells]

It's a pity the PS cloud filter doesn't have settings, I use a plug-in filter for clouds which has a lot more options. Very good plug-in set, which I'd highly recommend to anyone. Works with PSP too.