A New Enderra

[bartmoss]

Thanks jtougas :-)

Did more work.

Scale: I wanted the landmass to be a good, large continent (I even call it a "supercontinent" in my notes). It's now time to work out just exactly how large this thing is.

In the current maps I've used 1cm=200km. This means that the map covers about 12000 west to east and 8400 km in north-south. The actual continent is obviously a little smaller, since there's water around it on this map - a quick measurement shows it's about 42cm = 8400km east-west and 32cm=6400km north-south, counting from the tip of the main continent to the point where the ice begins. Since we have permanent ice there, it's also about the latitude of the antrctic circle.

Since 1° latitude equals to (roughly!) 110km on an Earth sized planet, it will be about 0.55cm on the map. So every 10° lat is 5.5cm. That means the equator is just south of the northern border of the map. The northern edge of the continent has the same latitude as Northern Peru, Indonesia or the Amazonas region. Or for a Northern comparison, the top edge of the main continent is about the southern end of Florida, the southern end is equivalent to Hudson Bay.

Here's a rough size comparison of the continent to the US and Europe (I so hope I did not mess up the scale too badly):



These are the ocean currents, again very simplified and based on what my lack of scientific training allows me to do:

[Chashio]

That looks nice!

I tried out the Painter12 30 day trial a year ago and had similar issues with it... it does NOT handle layers well, and the real watercolors slugged my computer too much, so I didn't end up getting it. But I think I remember that the real watercolors have their own special kind of layer to work on - that may be what was messing up with that. Possibly. It'd be worth some fiddling in the program and tutorial-searching on youtube.

[ManOfSteel]

That's very impressive. You've done a lot of work.

[bartmoss]

Thanks guys.
Chasio, the real watercolors do work for me - or rather they did for a few minutes. Looked nice, it took them a moment to "flow" but it was really alright. But then using them broke something in my user profile that caused complete corruption of all layers, even the non-WC ones. Even in new images when I didn't use watercolors. Luckily you can easily reset the profile and I haven't had problems with corruption afterwards (I stayed as far away from the watercolors as possible). I could even live with that - The layer issues are much worse. I can't easily edit a layer mask. From what I read it should be possible but when I switch to it, Painter hangs up. It's not a RAM issue, I have 8gb and painter uses 2.5 or so. It also doesn't seem to be possible to create a layer mask from a selection (!) or to copy & paste an image into an existing layer (!!!!). It's still good software - the simulated stuff looks really cool and convincing - but it's just... very rough around the edges. If it held up to even gimp on layers it would totally be worth 300€. Right now I'm thinking 70€.

Still, I have 28 days or so left, plenty of time to finish this map and come to a conclusion.

[Chashio]

Yeah. I had only 2gb of RAM =\

[bartmoss]

2gb is really not a lot

New WIP. Sort of. I did not work on this map much today, but I tried to figure out what style to do the land in. This is basically a manual smudge/blend of the preliminary colors. I think it doesn't look clean enough.