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  1. #1
    Guild Journeyer
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    Wip [WIP] This Orb: world-building and mapping project

    Hello, fellow cartographers!

    I have a world-building and mapping project that i've been working on intermittently for some time. The plan is to build a habitable extrasolar planet from the ground up, being pretty rigorous in applying what we know about gravity, weather, temperature, etcetera, to figure out what the climate should be like, and where various biomes should be (including some biomes not found on earth).


    My mostly unvisited blog: http://orb.jwbjerk.com/ documents and explains the world-building process, which may be of interest to some of you, but so far doesn't have anything to do with cartography until the last post. I've been dealing with the orbital mechanics and physics of the planet. Hereafter, i'll be free to focus on more of the good stuff (i.e. mapmaking) since i have most of the boring foundation out of the way.


    The basic plan for this Orb is as follows:
    This Orb is an out-of-the way planet in a sci-fi setting where some form(s) of FTL are possible. Several waves of sapient explorers, refugees, conquers, & colonists have settled there.

    • While humans can live on it unaided, it is not as hospitable as Earth.
    • This Orb is not conducive to global communication and rule.
    • The oceans are completely separated by land, so it's impossible to sail round this Orb.
    • Mountains, rivers, currents & coast make it generally less convenient to cross a continent.
    • There is one location that is geographically destined to be the crossroads of the whole planet.
    • Some factors prevent the inhabitants from rebuilding a spacefaring civilization.



    Anyway, you are here to see pictures of maps, so without further ado, here's what i got so far: The coastline, and a rough idea of where the mountains go. The blue area roughly indicates the area of year-round ice.

    Click image for larger version. 

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    Click either one for larger view.

    Click image for larger version. 

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    These were created in Photoshop, using LunaCell as a base that was much modified. The textures were then wrapped around a sphere in Google's Sketchup, and then captured to make the 6 views of the globe.

    Comments, Criticisms and Questions are welcome.
    Last edited by jwbjerk; 04-08-2010 at 10:40 PM.

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