World Map WIP in GIMP

[Karro]

Okay...

Given what the last post seemed to indicate about the layout of the world, I have made a few changes. There are no fancy artistic GIMP effects in these yet... It took me forever just to make these few changes.

First... I shifted the left/western two continents northward a little, and had to redraw the plate boundaries as a result:



Now, here's the new world with wind and ocean currents. The ocean currents are slightly off because I forgot to redraw them after moving the western continents, but you can probably see where they would actually lie.



Next, the bands of alternating wet, dry, and moderate climate zones (with the air currents turned on). I'm also showing the mountains and my new Lakes & Rivers, because these things will all interact to influence the local climate patterns.



This will help me accurately place my deserts, forests, jungles, etc., which we now have on the next map:



There are still a few climatological anomolies, I think, but by and large I believe this is a believable and relatively realistic world. Most of the anomolies are intentional anyway, typically the result of human influence on the environment and world.

Next (very big) step is to take this information and GIMP it up with all the pretty bells and whistles... Unless you guys have some major concerns with anything you see here.

Comments, criticism, feedback most welcome!

Thanks!

[Karro]

Okay... so I started a better job (better paying, but the company has more restrictive web policies and an aggressive website blocker) and then a week and a half ago I got married, which means for the past month or two I've been virtually incommunicado, especially with regards to leisure activities like this.

I'm still likely to be low on the radar for a while (I start evening grad classes in a couple weeks), but I'll try to post updates every once in a while as I work on this map. I just wanted to show everyone the (limited) progress I've made so far. (I wish I had more time to work on this, but life has other demands as the moment.) My previous posts have had some reduced size images (about 50% of full size), and I tried to upload a full-size image here, but even though it's only about 1460K JPG, the system won't upload it, so here's a 75% image.

So far, no forests, mountains or other features (I know where the mountains are going, which is what gives me the ability to draw in the rivers at this stage).



There's still a chance I'll want to work more on the coastlines to get them more interesting looking, or try to add in more barrier islands (adding barrier islands is a lot easier said than done!). Let me know what you think!

[ravells]

The general style looks fantastic, but to me the islands look a bit too uniformly round and blobby (technical term) - I'm not sure if it was intentional, but they somehow don't look right.