WIP - My Story World

[BlackChakram]

I would agree that you have a lot of wide swaths of empty between mountain ranges. But that leaves some excellent spaces for vast deserts, forests, or himalaya-like highlands. Really curious to see your river placements!

[sapphireLight]

@Namia
Thanks! I appreciate the feedback.

@Blindkingofbohemia
Thank you! I'll try to explain how I went about making the map.

To generate the land, I played around with Fractal Terrains a bit and got a few interesting shapes, but I ultimately decided to draw everything. I got a bunch of maps of Earth and examined how things looked on our world and tried my best to draw something similar. I'm using Photoshop CS4 Extended which has a nifty 3D object layer feature. It allows you to paint a texture on a 3D object directly. So, I imported a sphere and painted the land shapes right on it.

I started by drawing the land in black and white on a 6000x3000 pixel map, going back and forth between painting the globe and adjusting the flat map until I had shapes that I liked. Drawing right on the sphere also helped avoid distortion at the poles. I then painted the continental shelves on a new layer underneath the land. After that I picked some colors from an elevation map of Earth and painted in where I wanted the mountains. My layers from top to bottom are Elevation, Land, Shelves, and Ocean. I then took the map into G.Projector and exported a few orthographic globes. And that's pretty much it. I hope that was clear. If not, I'm happy to explain further.

@jbgibson
Thank you so much! The guild seems like a really great place with lots of helpful and knowledgeable people.

That's a good suggestion to add a bit more roughness to break up the flat areas some. And I like the idea of more lakes, too.

As far as climates go for the Main Continent, I wanted it to mostly be temperate and tropical. I wanted a little bit of desert in the middle beyond the long eastern mountain chain, with a large river flowing toward the west coast. There are rainforests in the south. The home of the main characters (which I call Dragon Kingdom for now since it has, well, lots of dragons) is on the east coast and is kind of barricaded from the other kingdoms because of the mountains. It should have mostly warm weather with lots of greenery. And yeah, I'm guessing they have to deal with hurricanes.

As far as the other continents go, I have no idea! I might try the Climate Cookbook to come up with something.

@BlackChakram
Yeah, I definitely want to add a lot of neat land features.