Askath: Continents

[Tiluchi]

Wow, this is great, and the improvement between this and your first map is impressive. I must say that I agree with Pixie re: the geology, though of course it's up to you if you want to redo it when you've gone this far. Though your mountains are far better, it still looks rather jarring to have it as essentially one cordillera with branches, rather than several parallel or unconnected ranges like you'll see in the Andes, the Rocky Mountains, or, well, kind of any high mountain range. Especially so when the style itself that you have is so beautiful and realistic-looking. Your larger rivers also look a little... odd... to me, especially the main channel of the river with its mouth to the southwest of the Mokhaṇṇam Mountains. Rivers are hardly ever that straight and/or angular, unless they're almost wholly manmade. I'd redraw it a bit and add some more curves and meanders to make it look more realistic.

I'm also a huge fan of your labeling- I like seeing some diversity of languages, and the extra letters. My limited knowledge of the IPA helps with some things, but I'm curious how you pronounce that ħ though- is it a voiceless pharyngeal fricative as my PhD in Wikipedia tells me?

Anyway, this is great work, and I'll be watching this one!

[woodb3kmaster]

Hey there.

You are indeed achieving a good balance in terms of color (in my humble opinion, that is) and your continents are increasingly realistic. But, you will soon, if you haven't yet, hit a wall... That's how much you can do with Wilbur. Wilbur works wonders and it is truly an achievement for mankind (at least, the part of mankind that does fictional mapping as a hobby), but it works well only for regional to local sized maps.

This is because it lacks some important aspects of the erosion process - mainly sediment deposition and variations in rock hardness. That's why Wilbur will never give you meanders, swamps and deltas, nor lakes and waterfalls.

I have tried to use Wilbur for continental maps, just like you are using, and I got a bit frustrated about it. But if I had the time/energy, here are some things I would do if I was to go back at using it at this scale:
- create "rain" maps and use them as masks when applying erosion
- create "icy/snowy/glacier" maps and use them as masks for some very deep erosion
- create "rock hardness" maps and use them as masks to apply random "up" noise
- create "lowlands" maps and use them to apply a smoothing "add" operation of a few meters every rain cycle
- create "desert wind-drive erosion" maps and use them as masks to apply a smooth/flatten effect like the actual effect of the wind on dry regions

All these and a tremendous number of very-light-on-their-effect cycles could probably turn results like yours (impressive at first sight, but quite repetitive when it comes to features on a continent) into something closer to reality.

In the meanwhile, something simpler you can do is simply to add more geological features to your continents - strings of mountain chains (small and large), plateaus (normally, one side of a mountain range is higher than the other, and very commonly, a plateau) - and to put some more effort in respecting general climate tendencies (river based erosion is hardly noticeable in the tropical desert areas, closer to poles you will have mountains eroded almost to sea level in channels, because of the glaciers).

Having said all this, I hope I didn't come out too negative. I appreciate your effort and am genuinely interested in where it will lead to. Keep it up!

Thanks for the advice! I don't mind the comments at all - in fact, I've already started noticing the limits of Wilbur at this scale, as you mentioned. I'd love to apply the kind of refinements you described, though I'm not sure how best to go about making the masks you listed. If you have any advice on that front, I'd love to see it.

One option that has occurred to me is to use another program that has a robust erosion simulator to get the desired effects. World Machine and WorldCreator (formerly GeoControl) both look like they could give good results; have you tried either?

Wow, this is great, and the improvement between this and your first map is impressive. I must say that I agree with Pixie re: the geology, though of course it's up to you if you want to redo it when you've gone this far. Though your mountains are far better, it still looks rather jarring to have it as essentially one cordillera with branches, rather than several parallel or unconnected ranges like you'll see in the Andes, the Rocky Mountains, or, well, kind of any high mountain range. Especially so when the style itself that you have is so beautiful and realistic-looking. Your larger rivers also look a little... odd... to me, especially the main channel of the river with its mouth to the southwest of the Mokhaṇṇam Mountains. Rivers are hardly ever that straight and/or angular, unless they're almost wholly manmade. I'd redraw it a bit and add some more curves and meanders to make it look more realistic.

I'm also a huge fan of your labeling- I like seeing some diversity of languages, and the extra letters. My limited knowledge of the IPA helps with some things, but I'm curious how you pronounce that ħ though- is it a voiceless pharyngeal fricative as my PhD in Wikipedia tells me?

Anyway, this is great work, and I'll be watching this one!

Thank you for the feedback! I'm definitely open to making further improvements like the ones Pixie described; it's just a matter of finding the right tools for the task. I'd also like to add more variety to those overly-straight rivers (which are purely a result of the terrain processing I did in Wilbur), even if it means having to add my own meanders and/or adjusting the contours on the map (as I did, for instance, on the atlas-style map of Zasháve at the bottom of this post). Adding some more breaks to the cordillera is also something I'll look into.

I appreciate the compliments on the labels - I'm working on my MA in linguistics, so I know just how insanely varied languages can be. Your intuition re: ħ is correct; I just decided to use its IPA value, although the languages themselves have yet to take shape.

I expect to make another atlas-style continent map tonight, but thanks to the excellent advice I quoted above, I'm also looking into ways to make the geography more realistic. If I can do it without shelling out some money for another program, great, but what matters to me at this point is the quality of the results. If anyone else has more knowledge in this area, don't hesitate to share it.

In the meantime, here's an atlas-style rendition of the first finished map I posted on CG:

[Mouse]

With all this technical talk about erosion and stuff going on I'm really a bit redundant, but I'd just like to say you've made leaps and bounds of progress since your first maps

[Pixie]

I'd love to apply the kind of refinements you described, though I'm not sure how best to go about making the masks you listed. If you have any advice on that front, I'd love to see it.

In Wilbur (as far as I know), you can use masks by loading selections. The way it works is that you create a B&W file with the same size as your map and paint it in a grayscale, where white is 100% strong effect and black is 0%, or no effect at all. This will let you limit the scope of any filter.

In more detail (I hope I am being clear):
Say tou have a continent with 3 distinct regions, one very wet part, a seasonaly wet and one mostly dry. You create three layers in your map, painting them black-to-white and save them as separate files - these you can call rainforest-mask, seasonal-mask and desert-mask. Then, in Wilbur, you load the rainforest mask as a selection and apply the Precipitation-based filter with a set of setttings, then you de-select, and load the seasonal-mask and again apply the filter, but with different settings... and so forth.

Another example, you create a pure white layer and paint in pure black where you want your lakes, then save this layer as a file and call it lakes-mask. Everytime you want to apply the "Fill Basins" filter in Wilbur, you first load this mask as a selection and then the filter will never fill the basins you marked in black (your lakes!).

Still, on a continent level, you need a continental amount of patience with Wilbur.... repeat the steps often and with very light strength each time.

I never tried GeoControl, and World Machine, although great, is limited to very small maps unless you buy the full version, which is useless for what you are aiming at.

[woodb3kmaster]

Thanks for the feedback, Pixie!

In Wilbur (as far as I know), you can use masks by loading selections. The way it works is that you create a B&W file with the same size as your map and paint it in a grayscale, where white is 100% strong effect and black is 0%, or no effect at all. This will let you limit the scope of any filter.

In more detail (I hope I am being clear):
Say tou have a continent with 3 distinct regions, one very wet part, a seasonaly wet and one mostly dry. You create three layers in your map, painting them black-to-white and save them as separate files - these you can call rainforest-mask, seasonal-mask and desert-mask. Then, in Wilbur, you load the rainforest mask as a selection and apply the Precipitation-based filter with a set of setttings, then you de-select, and load the seasonal-mask and again apply the filter, but with different settings... and so forth.

Another example, you create a pure white layer and paint in pure black where you want your lakes, then save this layer as a file and call it lakes-mask. Everytime you want to apply the "Fill Basins" filter in Wilbur, you first load this mask as a selection and then the filter will never fill the basins you marked in black (your lakes!).

Still, on a continent level, you need a continental amount of patience with Wilbur.... repeat the steps often and with very light strength each time.

I never tried GeoControl, and World Machine, although great, is limited to very small maps unless you buy the full version, which is useless for what you are aiming at.

Yes, I've loaded selections this way before. In fact, it was how I first set up the continents' basic height areas (lowlands, hills, mountains), since I followed one of waldronate's newer Wilbur tutorials. It would be pretty easy for me to make masks based on climate regions; my satellite-style maps use exactly that kind of mask in Photoshop, though perhaps somewhat blurrier than is appropriate for Wilbur. The masks I'm less sure how to create are the special ones you mentioned:

- create "rain" maps and use them as masks when applying erosion
- create "icy/snowy/glacier" maps and use them as masks for some very deep erosion
- create "rock hardness" maps and use them as masks to apply random "up" noise
- create "lowlands" maps and use them to apply a smoothing "add" operation of a few meters every rain cycle
- create "desert wind-drive erosion" maps and use them as masks to apply a smooth/flatten effect like the actual effect of the wind on dry regions

Some of these could probably be made from a combination of climate and height-based masks, but I'm wondering if you'd go about it differently, e.g. by basing them on other properties of the terrain.

Re: lakes, I actually did exactly what you suggested when I first started processing one of my continents in Wilbur, but I found that the surrounding land was eroding below the original lake elevation, so I switched to a different process: after getting the other geographical features the way I wanted them, I loaded the inverse of the lake map you described, set the lakes' elevation to just above zero (so they'd still get selected when I selected all terrain above zero), and then filled basins to get them back to the surrounding terrain level. Still, it's good to see that we have some similar ideas about how to make Wilbur do more of what we want.

After a bit of writer's block when coming up with toponyms, I've finally completed another pair of WIP maps:

[woodb3kmaster]

Although I'm away from home for Christmas, I have my laptop, so I was able to produce another new pair of WIP maps:





Due to this continent being very different from the others in terms of climate (it's almost entirely covered in ice), I'm less sure about the colors on the satellite-style map. I've looked at pictures of Antarctica for reference, but with so much white ground-cover, it's difficult to balance added detail with realism. The deep glacial valleys are another area of uncertainty; they're the result of applying some extra erosion after applying a "Mound" filter to emulate the elevations of large continental ice sheets. If anyone with experience mapping frozen landscapes has any advice on these points, I'd greatly appreciate it.

[Mouse]

Hi woodb3kmaster

Those are both attractive looking maps.

However, the fact that you have processed the land mass to show fluvial erosion, which wouldn't happen in an Antarctic type continent is a little distracting since there are unlikely to be any rivers to give you that kind of erosion pattern in that sort of climate. There would be plenty of ice shattering of the rocks, truncated spurs (ridges literally cut off at the end by glaciers), hanging valleys, and U shaped valleys (rather than V shaped ones).

As to how you could rectify the problem I've no idea, so I'm a bit less useless than a chocolate frying pan when it comes to helping you out with a solution.

There also seems to be an unnaturally tight line defining the mountains. Most mountain ranges have foothills on at least one side, even if they end abruptly at some natural fault line on the other. You might need to consider using a pre erosion base map with more gradual height transitions between maximum and sea level to encourage that effect. And that in turn might help you obtain more natural variation and cross ridges within the mountain ranges themselves.

The colour of the ice is really a matter of personal choice, since it can look completely different depending on the angle of incidence of the light, relative to the observer. I think you have it well within 'natural' looking bounds

[woodb3kmaster]

Thanks, Mouse! The idea behind the fluvial-style erosion was actually that the channels would suggest the presence of large glaciers. However, looking more closely at actual Antarctic geography, it doesn't look like there are any large, deep channels like on my last pair of maps. So I've tried blending the mound filter with the unmodified map, both to make the pre-existing river channels less prominent and to keep the basic mound from being too boring:





As for the abruptness of the mountains, I'm inclined to say that it's due to the ice sheet starting so close to them and likely covering the foothills. Whole mountain ranges are covered by the ice on Antarctica, so it isn't too far-fetched.

[Mouse]

I'm not keen on the blended version, though it could be improved if you used a continuous relief shading system to get rid of the sharp lines defining each colour (if that's even possible)

Here's a weird idea...

Given that the fluvial erosion is the only thing we have for the job, what happens if you raise the entire land mass to about 3/4 of the way between min and max while keeping the mountain ranges you've already got, and then run it through Wilbur?

I can't explain it, but I have this vague idea in my head that it might make the result a bit more Greenland-like.

EDIT: Forgot to say that I'm still admiring the colour choices

[woodb3kmaster]

Interesting idea, Mouse. I tried it out today and got these results:





Not exactly Greenland, but pleasing in their own way, I suppose. I could honestly be happy with either of the last two pairs of maps, but of course, I'm after realism, so any advice you (or any other reader) might offer is most welcome.