Sharrukin's Palace

Some more work on the world map over the weekend, rather painstaking. I’m flipping back and forth between continuing to paint in elevation contours at lower and lower levels, and adding ocean currents. Neither of these is finished, but another day or two of effort should have me there. Then the fun part begins – actually mapping out climate zones.

Here’s the current map:

Not a lot of time over the past couple of days to work on this, but I’ve managed to tweak some of the landforms a little. The planet resembles a mirrored Earth a bit less now. I’ve also started painting altitude contours on the map. So far, just the very highest peaks, the Andes- or Himalayas-equivalents, but the next few layers should cover all of the land areas with colored zones to indicate altitude.

A few hours of work this evening, while I had Wonder Woman playing in the background, and I ended up with a decent set of land-masses for my world map.

I seem to have reinvented an Earth, although flipped east-to-west. That not-North-America stands out in particular, and all those island arcs in the far western not-Asia are kind of reminiscent too. It makes sense, I suppose, since plausible plate tectonics aren’t going to generate completely arbitrary shapes.

There are differences too, of course. The pseudo-Atlantic ocean is a bit wider, and the continents are in general separated by stretches of sea. There’s a narrow gap between the not-Americas, and instead of a Mediterranean Sea there’s an open ocean between the not-Africa and the not-Asia. That’s going to do some interesting things to ocean currents, I think.

No matter. The actual stories I intend to write are going to be on a much smaller scale, so if the layout of the continents looks a little derivative, that won’t be obvious to my eventual audience. What’s important right now is that I’m reasonably satisfied with this layout, so I can move on to the next steps again.

One of the major stumbling blocks with world-building, at least for me, is that even when I’m momentarily satisfied with the outcome of a task, it doesn’t take much to rob me of that satisfaction. In this case, while staring at my world map draft in progress, I began to compare it to both the real world and to other world-builders’ efforts, and found it lacking. Too crude.

So I’ve gone back to first principles and started over, this time rebuilding a map of tectonic plates without pre-designing any of the continental land masses. This time I strove to come up with something to resemble the general pattern of tectonic plates on the real Earth, at least as far as the number of major and minor plates was concerned. I also paid attention to the way plate boundaries are arranged – whether they tend to be convex or concave, and how they form seams and three-way intersections.

One thing I found useful was to simply mark off the polar regions and ignore those. One of the things that was giving me fits was the transformation from a flat projection to the globe and back, and that switch always introduces the most distortion close to the poles. By assuming there will be no major polar land masses, I can gloss over how any plate boundaries might be laid out in the arctic or antarctic regions.

The result (equirectangular projection only) is as follows. So far, so good. I haven’t marked continental plates yet, but there will be five major continents and a few minor land-masses and island arcs.

Next step will be mark out the relative movement of plates at each boundary, and then sketch land-forms to match.

Just a quick report today: progress on my world maps for the Curse of Steel project. After tinkering a bit and learning how to build and use layer masks in Photoshop, I managed to paint mountain belts in their own layer on my map, with the following results:

Here, the deep-red belts are “young” mountains, the result of recent orogeny at the site of plate collisions or subduction. Think the Andes, Rockies, or Himalayas. The narrow, golden-brown belts are “old” mountains, the eroded remains of ranges that formed many millions of years ago in previous orogenic periods. Think the Appalachians or Atlas range.

One thing strikes me: the big continents to the east are going to have really big rain-shadow deserts, since those young, high mountains are going to block any kind of monsoon climate from moving too far inland. I’ll have to figure out the air circulation patterns next to know for sure. It makes sense, though, since large continents tend to have big arid zones anyway.

Next, it will be time to work out those climate patterns. I’ve been reading up on techniques for that all week, and the long weekend coming up should be a good time to work out the details.

Had the day off sick today, so in between bouts of ick I got a bit more work done on the world map for The Curse of Steel. Mostly this involved refining the landforms, using a much finer pencil stroke to create crinkly coastlines and islands. I’m fairly happy with the results. Here’s the equirectangular base map:

Much better continental shapes, not so cartoonish now, and clear island arcs. Another view, in the Mollweide projection for variety:

Next step will be to lay out mountain ranges, in accordance with the underlying map of tectonic plates. Once that’s done, I’ll need to work out air and ocean circulation patterns, and then lay out climate zones. Then it will be time to drill down to the regional scale and build the maps I’ll need to support the story.