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:
WM_Layout.JPG

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:
WM_LayoutGen.JPG

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:
Continent_HM_003_small.jpg

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:
Continent_003_32layers_xxsmall.jpg
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):
Continent_wind-ocean_currents.png

From there I was able to figure out roughly where the climates and biomes would reside on the continent:
Continent_climates_003_small.png

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.
Continent_003_Peninsula_Sketch_001_coastal002.jpeg

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).