Second attempt... need help with oceans, borders, etc.

[Chick]

Now you're looking much better! Still not much texture in the deep ocean, but since it's so dark you may not need more. The shallows look good and so do your rivers!

[Deadshade]

This is quite nice !
Did you use Wilbur or fractal terrain ? I am asking because Wilbur creates beautiful and realistic rivers but has this weakness that it creates them even in frozen polar lands where are no rivers.
You should eliminate them.

[sheldonl]

I did use Wilbur to create the rivers. I did not use any automated mechanism to create fractal terrains, I hand drew them based on rough guidelines of where I'd put tectonic plates. Once Wilbur created a high map and I created a bump map from that then I decided where the lakes would go and drew those by hand as well. I tried to keep in the guidelines previously mentioned in this thread while using only areas around the same elevation. I'll look at eliminating them in the arctic regions.

[sheldonl]

Now you're looking much better! Still not much texture in the deep ocean, but since it's so dark you may not need more. The shallows look good and so do your rivers!

Thanks Chick! I basically masked out the land and went through the same process to create the ocean as I did the land. I didn't necessarily want to create a lot of texture in the deep ocean but I suppose I could... something to think about. Thanks for the feedback. This has been an interesting experiment. When I started I didn't really know how to use a paint program let alone the Gimp, but the excellent tutorials on this site have helped tremendously!

[sheldonl]

This is quite nice !
Did you use Wilbur or fractal terrain ? I am asking because Wilbur creates beautiful and realistic rivers but has this weakness that it creates them even in frozen polar lands where are no rivers.
You should eliminate them.

Ok. Have a look at the attached and let me know if this is better.

[sheldonl]

Ok I've also done some work on general climate zones, ocean currents and winds. I'm attaching these to this post and would appreciate any feedback on how realistic those are and if I've got the regions done correctly as a result.




Thank you to everyone who has replied with suggestions and criticisms, you are really helping me make this better and learn...

[Deadshade]

It is difficcult to say something accurate about the detailed climatic features because your planet is very different from the Earth.
The energy engine of a climate are oceans and not continents or atmosphere and your planet is basically all continents and little oceans.
That means that the climatic engine is quite weak and can store only a little energy.
There would probably be no large scale seasonal features like hurricanes and monsums.

There would certainly be Hadley cells so that the winds on the second picture would be broadly correct between equator and the tropics. Just they are more NE to SW in N hemisphere and SE to NW in S hemisphere (not straight N-S). These are the trade winds but they would be quite weak over the continents. It is not even sure if there would be clearly defined cells N and S of the Hadley cells.

If the third picture are currents, there would not be large scale currents (like f.ex Gulf Stream) because these are driven by density differences and you simply have not enough ocean room to make the gradients strong enough.
Also you have no polar caps what weakens the Stream activity even farther.
So what's left are Wind driven currents and the third picture would be much like the second. But overall I suspect that there would be little regular strong current activity - more of small scale quite irregular features.

What is not natural is so much snow on the equatorial and subtropical mountains. Even the N reaches which are somewhere around 45°N should not have so much snow. Of course there may be a very weak sun but then there would be no tropical jungle and your planet would look more like a kind of brownish, greyish, whitish tundra/arctic waste.

[sheldonl]

It is difficcult to say something accurate about the detailed climatic features because your planet is very different from the Earth.
The energy engine of a climate are oceans and not continents or atmosphere and your planet is basically all continents and little oceans.
That means that the climatic engine is quite weak and can store only a little energy.
There would probably be no large scale seasonal features like hurricanes and monsums.

There would certainly be Hadley cells so that the winds on the second picture would be broadly correct between equator and the tropics. Just they are more NE to SW in N hemisphere and SE to NW in S hemisphere (not straight N-S). These are the trade winds but they would be quite weak over the continents. It is not even sure if there would be clearly defined cells N and S of the Hadley cells.

If the third picture are currents, there would not be large scale currents (like f.ex Gulf Stream) because these are driven by density differences and you simply have not enough ocean room to make the gradients strong enough.
Also you have no polar caps what weakens the Stream activity even farther.
So what's left are Wind driven currents and the third picture would be much like the second. But overall I suspect that there would be little regular strong current activity - more of small scale quite irregular features.

What is not natural is so much snow on the equatorial and subtropical mountains. Even the N reaches which are somewhere around 45°N should not have so much snow. Of course there may be a very weak sun but then there would be no tropical jungle and your planet would look more like a kind of brownish, greyish, whitish tundra/arctic waste.

Thanks Deadshade, I'll fix the issues with snow and the direction of the tradewinds. It's not that there are not more oceans or polar ice caps I just haven't shown them. I only created a map focusing on the area I was going to describe in my book, and it's really just 1-2 large land masses. I have not yet planned for any other continents or the rest of the planet. Perhaps I erred in not showing more Ocean at least to the west and east? If we assumed that this was only 2 closely connected continents on one side of an earth sized planet, with an ocean volume roughly the same as the earth, what then would you say?

[Deadshade]

Yes I already looked at the scales.
Assuming that you cover broadly the latitudes -90 , + 90 (because there would be otherwise no snow on the N and S edges of the continents you show) your longitudes run approximately from - 130 to + 130 (assuming a cylindrical projection).
So you show 260° out of 360° what is much more than a half of a sphere. You miss 50° W and 50° E.
100° is what separates Spain from Mexico so you are approximately missing an Atlantic ocean if your planet was the size of the Earth.

That is a big mass of water but not enough to significantly change the continent dominance (assuming that the 100° missing are only a big ocean and no further land is there)
But it would be enough to have good trade winds coming from the east to the continents and then going west in the large ocean.
It would probably also be enough to show some large scale persistent currents in this big ocean.

[sheldonl]

Yes I already looked at the scales.
Assuming that you cover broadly the latitudes -90 , + 90 (because there would be otherwise no snow on the N and S edges of the continents you show) your longitudes run approximately from - 130 to + 130 (assuming a cylindrical projection).
So you show 260° out of 360° what is much more than a half of a sphere. You miss 50° W and 50° E.
100° is what separates Spain from Mexico so you are approximately missing an Atlantic ocean if your planet was the size of the Earth.

That is a big mass of water but not enough to significantly change the continent dominance (assuming that the 100° missing are only a big ocean and no further land is there)
But it would be enough to have good trade winds coming from the east to the continents and then going west in the large ocean.
It would probably also be enough to show some large scale persistent currents in this big ocean.

Ok, I see what you are saying. I screwed up the placement of the climate zones. I have the 90 degrees where the ~70's should be (dang, I'll have to fix that too.)

What I don't understand is how you figure the longitude just from looking at it. I figured I was about 180 degrees total so now I'm a bit confused. Can you pls elucidate?

BTW: Thank you so very much for your feedback!