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Thread: Elevation, Weather Charts for Entire Fictional Planet

  1. #11
    Professional Artist Naima's Avatar
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    looks very nice .
    For render you can use Terragen 3 , for Further on regional detailing , you can use World machine to build up further detailed erosion . World machine can create stunning erosion flows but on a more local scale , using it on large worlds ends up with not realistic results .
    for small scales I mean something like an island or the like where you can clearly see the river basins etc .

  2. #12
    Guild Apprentice Podcreature's Avatar
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    Awesome, thanks for good advice! I will definitely need more localized detail, as I convert the global topology to something someone actually runs around in and on. I'll keep my eye on World Machine, or out for something with that characteristic. Looks like you can get World Machine stuff into Unity: https://www.world-machine.com/learn....rkflow=wfunity, so that's good news. I already liked WM for the price tag too, lol but without being able to compare these all on my computer, it's really helpful to hear endorsements from people who tried them or know their finer points.

  3. #13
    Guild Apprentice Podcreature's Avatar
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    So I am mostly finished with the elevation map. The sea is still a mockup, I haven't even tried to think critically about the continental shift yet... It's a fan-map so I was more worried about putting mountainas and valleys where the canon maps say they should be. So the final step will be attempting to make scientific sense of it.

    Any suggestions or critiques about what I have so far will be very much appreciated.

    Need to use the band-aid to fix some unnaturally straight edges along the river basins. I did decide one thing about those steep eroded trenches, which I'd failed to soften in Wilbur. At first they bugged me, but, they may not be so unrealistic for this particular map, considering the alien menace "thred" began to fall between thousands and millions of years ago, and the forests were pretty much wiped out by the time colonists arrived. I read about Iceland: a mostly barren landscape that was also once covered in forest. It's experienced severe erosion that's had a great impact on it's terrain. The erosion has actually made large areas of land essentially uninhabitable. On a planetwide scale, I can't imagine the impact all that displaced sediment would have had on ocean ecosystems. I suppose whatever survived would have adapted.

    I'm worried the font in the gradient scale is too small.

    Click image for larger version. 

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    Last edited by Podcreature; 09-11-2014 at 12:56 PM. Reason: bolded question

  4. #14
    Guild Apprentice Podcreature's Avatar
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    Here's the ocean currents map. Pyer was a big help, sending me scans from his Atlas of Pern (which I do not own.) Thanks, Pyer!

    I didn't want to go against canon, so only made one semi-significant edit. The southern stream, on the East portion of the map, instead of going round and round the south, goes North, and enters the subsidence zone in the sub-arctic seas. This is because, the entire reason the North and South currents go in opposing directions is because it's all one big current going in a loop. Yet the southern current really didn't tie into the north in any of the original maps. Here's a great example of how this works on Earth: www.e-education.psu.edu/earth1…

    Feel free to critique and let me know if I'm on the right track or not.

    Click image for larger version. 

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    Does the map title look like it's in a good place? I centered it before but it just seemed distracting that way. Maybe I need to spend more time on a different design for it. I really was in too much of a rush to get on to the other projects.
    Last edited by Podcreature; 09-13-2014 at 09:25 AM.

  5. #15
    Guild Grand Master Azélor's Avatar
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    I think you should have 2 westward currents at the equator. Then the water turns poleward when reaching the westernmost part of the ocean.

    like this:

    http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedi...erless%293.png

  6. #16
    Guild Apprentice Podcreature's Avatar
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    I agree, Azelor. I kept thinking that over and over whenever I looked at the chart in the books. I will see what I can do, I didn't actually make up these currents, I am trying to stick to canon, but I will think more on this. Oh, I probably should have mentioned earlier somewhere that (edited) I think Pern rotates in the opposite direction of Earth, but I'm not sure. There's some statements I have to find again. That might affect current, if I'm not just copying an already made map.

    ADDED: Maybe I should make a canon map and a non-canon one. Might be neat to have both on my group's resource site for people to think about.
    Last edited by Podcreature; 09-13-2014 at 03:11 PM.

  7. #17
    Guild Apprentice Podcreature's Avatar
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    Question: Anyone got tips or links to how to make a sinusoidal or equal-area map from a square map? I'm thinking along the lines of the two halves design. I need this one for threadfall charts to really get a sense of mileage covered by the strips of fall, on a spherical object.

  8. #18
    Guild Master Falconius's Avatar
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    Like G. Projector?

  9. #19
    Guild Grand Master Azélor's Avatar
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    the sinusoidal map projection looks awful. And if you want to split the map in two, I'm not sure that equal area projections are the best for that purpose. It depend what you have in mind.

  10. #20
    Guild Apprentice Podcreature's Avatar
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    Thanks Falconius! That's exactly what I'm looking for! And I'm not worried about looks for this batch. They're purely for function. I need to be able to move a pattern of bands over the planet that are of equal length and be able to see pretty close to the actual surface area they'd cover. If that makes sense. It doesn't have to be *perfect* but more accurate is better. It cannot, however, be too interrupted (like this) or it will make moving the thread pattern around on the surface too tedious to calculate. I need to make a -lot- of these charts.

    So I was thinking something like this: http://www.progonos.com/furuti/MapPr...s180-R-z20.png .. but, is this not equal-area? Should I aim for at least three lobes?

    I could find a happy medium with something like this: http://www.progonos.com/furuti/MapPr...dal-s75-i3.png

    I could just try to project all this onto a globe in ZBrush and have a REAL sphere to work with. But projecting these maps onto a ZB sphere with the Spotlight seems like it would be quite tedious.

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