Fantasy Continent (Image Heavy)

[OrangeBug]

Hey all, this is a log post for a Fantasy Continent I've been working on for the past few months.

The project originated as an experiment in World Machine to see if I could generate continent sized terrains. Previously I had only made small islands, or sections of terrain. Because I have the Pro version of World Machine, I can render it at very large resolutions, and at non-square aspect resolutions.
This is the layout I used in World Machine, a fairly simple setup:


I used 2 sets of Perlin Noise generators plugged into an Advanced Perlin generator, which gives me the most flexibility. I used the Layout Generator to create a basic mask of the continent, which looked like this:


I later flipped the render horizontally, because I would've had to have the planet rotating in the other direction for the climates to end up how I wanted them. It was easier to just flip the continent than have to remember that the Sun rose in the West and set in the East. The ColormapPro plugin is a macro for rendering terrain textures. I ended up not using it, because it was too complicated to try to mask out each climate and render a different texture for it.

Ultimately, here is what I came up with:


The continent features a prominent southern peninsula, and a small island chain in the south east bay.

After exporting a high-res height map from World Machine, I imported the grayscale image into Inkscape. There I ran a multi-layer Brightness Bitmap Trace, which essentially posterized the image, breaking the map into several topographical layers (originally I did 16 layer, but later did a 32 layer version for more resolution). Then I colored each layer to create a falsely colored topographical map that was easier to look at than a grayscale image, and also included my intended waterline:

I should mention that the full size of the above image is a 50mb PNG that is about 17k x 11k pixels. This enormous size would give me quite a number of problems later on.

While I was designing the terrain, I was referencing the book, A Magical Society: Ecology and Culture to help design a realistic set of climates and biomes. I decided that the continent would occupy roughly 60 degrees of Latitude, and about ~94 degrees of Longitude. This would allow for the greatest range of climates, ranging from dense jungles, to snowy tundra. I overlayed a set of wind and ocean current templates I got from this blog which is also based on the Magical Society book. Here it is overlayed on the continent (this is using the earlier 16 layer trace):


From there I was able to figure out roughly where the climates and biomes would reside on the continent:


During this process, I had be considering running an open-world exploration RPG using 5th edition D&D. At this point, with a fully roughed out continent to explore, I started writing that game (which will be starting at the end of the month).

More recently, I've been following some of the tutorials on Fantastic Maps, and have started working on a handdrawn version of the map (I'm working on a crop-in of the southern peninsula and inner islands, as that's where the RPG is starting). So far I've worked on some of the mountains, and have also traced the coast, and am working on filling in the coastal details.


I'm drawing using partly the pen on my Surface Pro 4, or my Intuos tablet, whichever I have handy at the time. I'm using Krita to draw.

And that is where I am at this point (1/7/16).

[OrangeBug]

To give a sense of the scale, here is an older image overlay on Google Earth:


It's roughly the same size as Faerun. In fact, the west coast of the continent is about the same length as the Sword Coast. My rough estimate of the size of the map is ~5700 miles x ~3600 miles.

And before anyone asks, I'm ignoring the fact that horizontal distances would technically shorter on the northern regions of the map, and just going with a rectilinear projection for ease of use.

[OrangeBug]

Update: 1/8/16

Masked out the coasts to create a mask for the ocean color. Added some highlights along the coast.

[Caenwyr]

you get way too little credit for this work. You're on a roll here mate, it looks magnificent, and very promising! Keep up the good work!

[J.Edward]

Agreed. The coasts look splendid OrangeBug.
Keep it up.

[OrangeBug]

Thanks guys!

I'm getting a little more comfortable drawing out the ridge lines of the mountains, so I tackled one of the larger ranges on the northern part of the map:


I also imported a paper texture for the background, so I could use overlay and color blending layers to add depth. I couldn't get the water color to blend properly with the paper texture (Krita's layer blending order isn't as intuitive as Photoshop's), so I left it solid for now.

[J.Edward]

I like that you're going for top down with the mountains.
Not a lot try to make that work. I think it's a good choice.
I'll offer any advice I can, as I do a lot of top down mountains too.

[Deadshade]

When doing the mountains and if you are going after a realistic (e.g physical) lay out as it seems, remember that ranges are very rarely disposed in closed curves (circles, ellipses etc) unless they are of mega volcanic origin.
As a mountain is generated by 2 tectonic colliding plates, the ranges are generally straight (sometimes slightly incurved) parallel lines following the line of contact between the 2 plates.

[OrangeBug]

You are quite correct, these mountains were generated with Perlin Noise, which tends to give bubbly bumpy results. I occurs to me that I may be able to get more realistic mountain ranges by stretching the noise generators on 1 axis (to create long lines of mountains), and then mask them into the terrain using other noise generators.
However for this project it's a little too late to drastically change the generated map, since I have a long-term campaign starting in about 2 weeks that is based off of this map.
I suppose I could invert the small valleys and turn them into wider mountain peaks, I may experiment with that at some point.

[OrangeBug]

Also, I may be converting some of the ranges in this region into Tepui (for story reasons), so having some weird valleys would work in that context.