A couple of useful pints about rivers that were left out: 1. Long rivers like the Amazon or Mississippi curve quite a lot. If you measure a straight line from the source to the coast, and another following every curve in the river as closely as possible, it should approximate pi (meaning it should approximate a long series of semicircles on average). Some of this curvature will disappear on your maps, and this only applies to, say, the longest couple of dozen or so rivers in the world (as you'd expect dealing with the law of averages; the total length of all rivers in your world combined should make an even closer approximation), but in general your rivers should probably look curvier than your instincts say they should. 2. Rivers flow downhill. I know this was said, but it's a somewhat more profound statement than it might seem. While rivers do tend to take a relatively direct route to the coast, the important thing to remember is that rivers are non-sentient (our brains like to assume everything is sentient, and sometimes they need a reminder) and can't look ahead to the lowest elevation region nearby. Most importantly of all, they can never go uphill. At every spot along your river, take a survey of every spot immediately next to it and have the river go in the lowest direction; even if there's a valley close by that's much lower, the river will not go there in anticipation of a lower energy state if in means going the slightest bit uphill. This may change due to erosion over time of course, but the point here is that these small scale, entirely local physics dictate the large scale pi-approximating curviness of large rivers. Oh, also, this is why rivers don't split except in highly unusual circumstances.
TL;DR: Rivers with a short distance from the mountain to the coast are somewhat straight, rivers that go through a long plain zigzag *all over the place* as mentioned above. It's worth mentioning that while slow flowing rivers curve a lot, fast flowing rivers curve very little. A region with a long area of relatively flat land (such as the central USA where the Mississippi runs) will have a shallower slope, meaning the water will be slower and it will curve more. An area with mountains directly by the coastline will have a steep grade the water flows down, so it will run faster and cut deeper (meaning it will be straighter). A good example to compare against the Mississippi River is the Colorado River near the California/Arizona border or the Nile River near Dongola.
Hmm, if you're going to do everything again after setting on a projection, why make such detailed outlines in the first version? Wouldn't it be better to make the general outlines first and then detail them more on the regional step?
I mean, every detail you add in the previous step will be something that you won't have to duplicate in later steps should you decide to map out the same region in multiple projections.
It seems to me that the problem with having to retrace all the boundaries could be solved by simply having a program that can so the projection for a vector graphic directly, giving you an other vector graphic. If that does not exist yet and if I had to make a bunch of these maps, I personally would have written a Python script to do this. Yes, it's gonna be a challenge to figure out how exactly a Bezier curve would behave and you would probably have to make some kind of approximation that still leaves you with a more complex file, but for me, it that would totally be worth it.
@@1224chrisng That would not actually do the same thing. If you have a vector graphic, you can distort the lines as much as you want and keep the original line width. If you distort a raster graphic with these lines, the line width can change dramatically and this would look quite ugly especially near the poles.
I find that when looking at real rivers, If there is any sort of mountain range in the way, rivers will not flow straight to the sea. May rivers instead carve valleys and end up flowing into completely different oceans - The Danube, Mekong, Yangtze, even the Nile and Amazon.
It's particularly clear with the Amazon. The contributories of that river are sometimes 200 to 250km away from the Pacific Ocean. Yet, the flow over 20 to 30 times that distance to the Atlantic Ocean. Rivers don't care where the closest ocean is. They just always flow to the next point that's lower then where they are. If they come to a point where every next point is higher they will form a lake and as soon as the waterlevel of the lake is higher than the lowest point around the lake it will form a river again and continues to every next lowest point.
Closer to (presumably) home for him, the River Severn is another great example of this. Despite starting near the north-west coast, it gets blocked by the Welsh mountains and so instead it flows east into England, then curves south and comes out into the Bristol Channel.
@@myquandros4129 i like when games nonsensically insert waterfalls from a cliffside of a tiny mountain starting from the top of the mountain...almost as if there were a giant leaking pipeline of water coming out of a rock. The mountain is never tall enough to have any glacial formations, and yet the mountains which are somehow have no rivers forming from it. It's like they made games to have a giant tap in a random place.
When I make maps I draw mountain range peaks and major'ish rivers first. Then I fill in the height layers accordingly. That makes it way easier to make realistic maps where erosion has formed most of the landscape.
I don't know, if you do it normaly, but I saw that you tend to draw rivers over elevation regions that spike outwards to lower elevations (English isn't my first language, so I have difficulties to describe very well what I mean). For me it would make more sense to let them flow where the lower elevations cut into the higher ones - what you do at some parts - since water tends to 'eat' away land over time. Further, I think that rivers don't necessarily need to go rather straight - especially in flat regions. Some are quite bended and curvy. These rivers can often change their beds, for example through floods and other things - which can result into forked rivers or sickle moon shaped lakes near the rivers. But I agree, that a forked river arm may dry out at some point, since the river bed builds up sand and can cut of the water flow. On another thought, bendy rivers may be seem rather straight on maps, due to the scale. I am in no way a specialist - so I might be wrong, but I thought it might be worth noticing.
Thanks for the answer Artifexian, I think I see the process now! Also, interesting titbit about rivers: the ratio between a river's length and the distance between source and ocean/lake has an average value of pi (3.14) on Earth, so if you twisted out all of a river's meanders into the same orientation, you would end up with an almost perfect circle with a diameter equal to the source - sea distance
..I'm trying to figure out how to use that info. So, if you could make a "string" (which preserved the length of the river but was laterally flexible) and then fastened one end to the source and the other to the "mouth", you could simply wind (meander) and fasten it onto the map as you have length remaining, as it will automatically give you leeway to place it dependent on your previous placements! Very nifty! Now, is there a way to make a "length constrained string" in your vector software of choice?
With very precise and unshaded images like these, there are vector interpretation programs that can take an image (your newly projected map) and automatically create a vector image from it again. That would save a lot of time (though I'm afraid I can't give any examples that currently work well and are free).
Really looking forward to see the correct way of adding labels and objects onto the map. A month ago I had to create custom tiles of a city for a mobile app, and I basically re-created them every couple of zoom levels, otherwise it just didn't work, especially with labels and buildings. I suspect (and hope) there is an easier way of doing this...
I know this map is not about realism but about the drawing process, but it triggers me SO MUCH how he keeps making rivers that flow along mountain ridges! He said it himself, water takes the shortest way towards lower elevations, unless something is in its way. Other than that I love this video, as always ;)
There are still valleys, trenches and cliffs that are not detailed on this kind of map. Some rivers travel far away from coasts because of such blockers but it all depends on the amount of rainfall at that point. Niger river is amazing that way.
While rivers will tend to take the most direct route, something to consider is if there is smaller topography at the coast blocking them from the most direct route. Meaning, if there is just a few meters of sand to sand dunes blocking the river, it may force it to find a less direct route out to the sea. I grew up near a river that gets within 340 meters of the coast and then is diverted sharply north by just a 3 - 4 meters of sand higher than the river surface along the coast. It then continues north until it empties into a brackish slough which opens up into a large submarine canyon. The new mouth has to be continually opened by machinery each year to stop it from returning to its old course because sand movement closes it up during the drier part of the year.
In G.Projector, if you turn off your overlays, change graticules, pick a preojection, set centre, etc, etc to something you like, you can use "Edit>Save Map Settings To Preferences" to set all maps to automatically open with those settings.
A note about rivers: rivers cut ravines. When choosing where to place the origin of the river, avoid putting it on ridgelines like Artifexian did at 21:56. If there's a spot where a lower elevation is deeper inland, that's where your river goes (as shown at 20:00). If there's a spot where two elevation contour lines are close together, that's a steep hill or cliff and the water will be pulled in that direction.
Hi artifexian. Are you planning to make a video about this map going into details of geopolitics ?(like history, natural resources, cultures, etc..) Another thing, can you overlay a country or a known landmass on the map so we get a sense of scale? Thanks for this amazing series
Something I've found useful for rivers is that map contours can guide the path of rivers: if you've got lots of contours close together (i.e. a steep area) the river will be close to a straight line, if the contours are further apart, the river might meander more Also, I don't know how realistic this is, but I like to have the rivers go down across a contour where the contour makes a v-shape, inverted or otherwise. U-shapes work too. Those are also the points where you'd likely have rivers joining into one
When a river cross a contour line, if the terrain is relatively steep, there will be a V in the contour that always (well, probably 99+% of the time, I have no doubt there's a few counterexamples somewhere) points upriver, never downriver. It's because the river erodes downward, so it cuts _into_ a contour.
It was painful to watch you manually set the width and profile rivers multiple times. As long as you have one of those rivers selected, all other rivers you draw will use the same style settings.
That wouldn't be good. You want rivers that merge into other rivers to be smaller at their tail end than those rivers they merge into when they reach the sea. Doing them one by one allows you to choose the right width for each river and creek even if they all go to the sea without merging. They come in different sizes in reality and are therefore drawn in different widths on most atlases.
I'm rewatching this series and I think it's worth noting that if you use QGIS you can change the projection directly in the app without having to retrace. It is a bit more tedious to draw in QGIS but since it's specifically made for mapping and you can do all the stuff with attributes I think it's worth it
You could save time with the tracing part at 12:00 mins Have you instead tried importing your image into Photoshop, select a colour, which will give you a selection to convert to a vector path, which you could then export to illustrator? It might save you a lot of time. and you won't have the internet screaming at you... e.g: ruclips.net/video/UxCHYxZXkEg/видео.html Because you have a colour table, in PS, you could first magic wand the colour there, and then choose select/select similar which would give you your shape to convert to a path. Just an idea/theory, but it should work (as they say in engineering on Star Trek) ....if you have PS. EDIT: OR - Instead, of drawing a colour shape with the pen tool, then try the Freeform Pen Tool when making your initial shape, (basically draw a path from the start) then fill with the colour, ( or allow PS to fill it when you complete your shape) . ruclips.net/video/fSMx0yiW0Ew/видео.html ruclips.net/video/WOjpG9i5ZWw/видео.html
This technique does not seem to do a good job tracing the "rougher" paths created with the pencil tool. They convert to PS as jagged curves, but when you convert it to a path in PS, it smooths everything out, losing a lot of detail.
@@brianbucklein315 yeah , you're right there. I forgot about that, sorry. It's not perfect Adobe hasn't updated it since it was made so it might just work in certain circumstances. But some options might help - comes down to time invested for your work...but there are some other options... Instead, of drawing a colour shape with the pen tool, then try the freeform pen tool when making your initial shape, (basically draw a path from the start) then fill with the colour, ( or allow PS to fill it when you complete your shape) . ruclips.net/video/fSMx0yiW0Ew/видео.html but for the selection to path method... 1. Worth trying the ALT key when you click the made path from the selection button. It will bring up the "tolerance" dialogue box, set it to 0.5 pixels. Then go to the Add Anchor points tool for the jagged edges - ( either this or you're redrawing it anyway in illustrator) If your image resolution is too low the smoothing will be more noticeable. 2. Working on a higher dpi resolution image (usually its good practice to work on twice the image size you want for the final result) can also allow for these inaccuracies and might become unnoticeable once the final image is reduced to the intended size. When drawing the initial shapes keep the image zoomed out so you don't get caught up in tiny detail that defeats the purpose. 3. I hear Corel Draw does it better - they have a free 15 day trial so maybe see if that works.
If you are going into this layer of detail, maybe you should work with georef tools like ArcGIS or qGIS. That way you don't loose your vectored info when working with different projections. There you also would be able to convert your level curves into height maps or vice verse. That way you can extract curve lines from height maps, which will save you a lot of effort.
I hand-drew on on a sinusoid-like projetion of an oblong spheroid that closely approximates my very slightly egg-shaped world. Is there anyway to use G-Plates or something else to wrap it onto an oblong spheroid? Otherwise, is there any option better than trying to figure out how to do it in Blender?
I would love to see you do a map project based on a planet that is tidally locked to its star, and eyeball earth. I know you've touched on that stuff before but I'm super curious what you will create with all your knowledge on these subjects when creating a eyeball earth that can support life, and how the effects of being tidally locked effect the geography topography Biomes and where civilizations might arise.
Hello, Edgar! Sorry to be late but I have a question: How do I flip the stroke’s profile in iPad Illustrator? Oddly as it sounds the iPad version of Illustrator do not have that “flip button” you used on the PC version. If anyone else knows, I would really appreciate an answer :)
I think illustrator is going on my Christmas list. Looks so much better than my attempts in Photoshop, even if it does involve redrawing the whole thing :'D
If you have PS, you could select the color with the magic wand, on the colour table, select/select similar, convert to a path, export to illustrator - or just continue in PS. No need to redraw the whole thing or even get illustrator really....in theory. in PS you could keep drawing slections and converting them to paths. See my comment above for more info
There's a way of not doing it all over again: At least in Photoshop you can select a color with the wand tool which will make a selecting of everything in the same color on the raster layer. Then convert that raster selection to a bunch of curves and there you go, a group of curves needing a bit of extra tweaking, but without days of work!
Edgar, firstly, would love to get your thoughts on plausible hollow earth scenarios. Might be worth a couple of vids. Questions to answer might include: how would gravity work? What thickness the shell? How might light work; what stands in for the sun? Also, and this touches on this video, what differs in mapping a concave rather than convex sphere?
Hey! Do you know of any really good systems for projecting your world maps onto hex grids for rpgs? I know icosahedral is nice and would fit very nicely. I've made some nice hex gridded icosahedral maps before. I've got a world somewhat like this one with continents at the poles and at the equator. I know it's unrealistic to find a projection that somewhat maintains shape, size, *and* directionality, let alone one that uses an unusual grid and coordinate system, but I figured I'd ask anyway.
+Artifexian Performing a bit of necromancy here by posting on this video, but I have a question: in the temperate zones you suggest using equidistant conic projection. In the course of making my own atlas-style map I noticed that lines of latitude in this projection are curved, not straight. How would you approach drawing the graticules in Illustrator in this situation? Is using the ellipse tool and approximating the curve by eye the solution, or is there something a bit more elegant available?
I agree with francisco; doing everything again after setting on a projection is a massive waste of time. If it's absolutely necessary then it should only be a general outline you can draw over later, similar to what you already did in G-Plates. Even then, you can still technically achieve a similar effect by just warping and transforming your topography groups in Illustrator. I'm especially cross with this process because 1. this step blindsides people who, up until this point, were under the impression their topos would be final, and 2, even with a drawing tablet, drawing the different topographies is MURDER on your fingers. So I really wouldn't advise it.
Just want to say on the topic of hurricanes, if you're unsure which regions or climates should have hurricanes, remember where they hit here, on Earth. They form off the coast of West Africa every year, and they follow the warm currents across the Atlantic, generally hitting the southern coast of US. They also often form in the gulf of Mexico and generally will hit one of the gulf states. The islands are almost always in the path of hurricanes that make landfall in the US. But there are also many that just follow the warm currents north until they dissipate. Look where these locations are on earth in regards to climates, and there's your answer really. Hurricanes form when there's enough rotational spin, pressure, and warm water.
Also, for credibility, I live in a state that tracks them all year as it can be a huge threat to my state, though...lol, many party during them. Some surf. Can't say my state has the brightest people lol.
The conical rivers threw me for a loop. I can't recall any map or atlas I've seen that does that except for maybe near coasts and the Mississippi and Yukon Rivers. I can see why you did it, but it just looks kinda weird to me.
The projection suggestions work well for smaller areas, cylindrical for equator, conic for temperate, azimuthal for polar, etc... What would you suggest for a continent the size of South America, stretching from a southern tropical area to a northern nearly polar latitude? Is there a projection that would work well at that size? Trying not to break up the map of the continent since it's the primary area players will be adventuring.
... to speed it all up a tad, do you think doing the thinggy which selects colours to create shapes from an image would be useful when you're redrawing the map out in Illustrator? I'm not very proficient in Illustrator i havent touched it in years but yeah. Thats one thing i remember existing
If you look you can pretty easily find some drawing tablets around the £20/$25, they're pretty small and by no means the best out there but it's not a massive investment and they can help you to decide if it's really something you're interested in
Given you can import a Winkel-Tripel map in to G-projector, is there any reason you didn't work on a map set to this projection in Illustrator to minimise distortion? My workflow so far has been GPlates - export to image - image in to G-Projector - export Winkel-Tripel map - in to editor of choice as underlay to make map. I assume you could create a shape on the artboard in Illustrator that matched the WT outline.
So you have three kinds of regions with different projections: polar, temperate and equatorial regions. What about areas that are close to the border between two regions? Sometimes these border areas might appear in two different projection regions, and thus on two different pages of the atlas. How do you copy the rivers from one projection to another? I hope you can understand this question.
If you want to get a tablet and don't want to spend a lot of money try Huion. Their cheapest tablet is only 25 dollars. I used it and it's just as good as any of the more expensive tablets out there.
Um... couldn't you just load the projection w/o the gridlines into photoshop and then reproduce vector lines via a magic wand selection, followed by any necessary tweaks to the vectors in Illustrator? I feel like that would be infinitely faster. I also feel like you could probably use something to warp / scale the original Illustrator vectors to match the projection while still in Illustrator, but I'm really only experienced with the pen tool in that program.
Are you thinking about water basins as you are doing the rivers? As they are the lifeblood of most and all river systems in a country's. As streams or sources of rivers aren't just random springs sometimes they are also water from the soil from rain..
Hi Alejandro -Just another world builder here - if you are tracing your original shapes in GPlates, use the polygon tool to draw your land masses. When you have one drawn, you can use select feature, and then select the measurement tool. It will tell you both the perimeter and the area of the polygon you just traced. You could add your shapes' area values together and divide by the area of your entire global map and you would have your % land mass vs ocean. Not super slick but does the trick!
I noticed that your rivers were feeding into the concave side of altitude lines sometimes; valleys would be shown by rivers feeding into their convex sides from higher altitudes. I hope I'm being clear; might be nitpick but it felt like an important detail to me. ^^
If say you already have an outline of your world: continents, islands, the general order you’d prefer your creation to be. How would you go about designing it through illustrator in this style? Do I simply trace out what I have and draw on top of it? You’re help would be greatly appreciated, love your channel man, super helpful.
Does anyone know what reference atlas Artifexian uses? I'm trying to follow along, but the atlas I found at the library is a little tough to follow along stylistically with
I have a bunch of questions, but I'm going to just start with one for now... How do you show sea ice in something like this? Does it even belong in this kind of map? I have a map with continents packed in the southern hemisphere but it does have significant northern polar sea ice - enough that there is a small unfortunate tribe of humans stranded on it! With this map, it would look like their home is just in the middle of the ocean. It might be worth its own video, but I'd like to learn more about how polar ice forms and how far it creeps up/down from the poles. Is it just based on a planet's average temperature? I imagine the tilt of the planet is involved. Most of the research I've found dives straight into modern climate change which focuses more on the heating of the planet than the cooling of it...
Some applications (Like Google Maps) show increasing levels of detail as you zoom in further. It would be irritating, for example, to illustrate the entirety of the Mississippi river watershed in one map. If you drew out ever single little creek and stream that fed into the Mississippi, when you zoomed out it'd all be one big splotch. Do you know of any programs that would allow a user to create ....ah.. several instances of the same map, to achieve a similar "Google Maps" effect to hide or show certain details depending on zoom?
QGIS (free GIS software) allows you to do this by selecting how features display at which levels of zoom - but get ready for a learning curve :) I did this with one river I made up and drew it to high detail for a km or so and set the zoom level visibility so that once you zoomed past a certain level it turned into a line, and if you kept going far enough, it faded altogether. Makes you realize how huge the world is...
Any recommendations for projections if you were going for an old-timey atlas look? Say you were making an in universe artifact and some of the more advanced compromise projections haven't been developed.
Probably equirectangular for equatorial regions, equidistant conic for temperate (Ptolemy used both of those), and stereographic for polar regions (used in ancient Egypt for star maps).
In the next couple of days I'm going to bite the bullet and get a better laptop (need one for university, anyways) and a graphics tablet. I hate technology, lol, but I'm going to try to learn how to use inkscape. I'm actually looking forward to making some decent maps.
Heres A question Say you have Uruguay 1.4times earth size and Giants have formed a colony, question is Food source to sustain giant population in that region?, I thought maybe fish at first given the rivers and the big lake but outside opinion.
Illustrator has an image tracing feature that could do the work of manually retracing everything for you^^°. I mean it's not perfect, but as you are working with a high-resolution image and you know your colors, it should be pretty accurate. Just play around with the threshold a bit.
I've been binging your stuff a lot lately, and am finding it very useful and informative, but I'm mapping a torus, so a lot of these programs for projecting onto a globe aren't really useful to me :p For now I've just split the world into 32 trapezoidal segments, and am mapping on those.
That’s where QGIS(or any other gis suite comes in). You could also do that directly using gdal/ogr, but the vector data needs to be in a GIS format. Just about everything can handle .shp shapefiles, which can be drawn and exported from GPLATES. It may be time for me to pop out another blog post…
OK so I'm new to mapping, this is probably a stupid question but: what are the projections for, why go through the trouble of retracing every single line? You've mapped the whole thing onto a globe in the first place so wouldn't it be fine without projections?
Since Artifexian brought the topic of deserts up, deserts are defined by their lack of precipitation, not by anything else. Is it theoretically possible for some kind of green region to exist thats also a desert?
@@brainzpvz2592 I mean, theoretically you could have a system of water filled caves close to the surface, and have plants with deep roots collect the water in question. If from there you had a water cycle with little to no percipitation involved, it would work.
I would like to make a map for a word exclusively made of islands, archipelagos, atols, and such. How can I make this? Only oceanic plaques? Is that realistic?
Actually, if I’m not mistaken, the area around Indonesia is actually a continental plate! This means that a continental plate doesn’t necessarily have to have one big landmass. A couple of such continental plates combined with oceanic plates could help create the different terrains and weather patterns as our world, while maintaining the aesthetic of a world made up only of islands - ie, you could have one archipelago have a more temperate climate, while another island chain is more like Hawaii, and still another has a Mediterranean climate! As for realism, I forget why Indonesia is the way it is, but I do know that your world just warmed up from an enormous ice age, and the entire world was covered in glaciers, the continental plates would have been pressed down into the mantle by the weight of the ice. If that ice were to melt all at once, you’d have a bunch of islands and archipelagos. This is actually what would happen if Antarctica or Greenland were to melt all of a sudden. Come up with a reason for this sudden warming, and baddabing baddaboom, you have a world of islands and archipelagos. Another option would be to simply raise the sea level, so that only the tips of mountains would peek through. That could be pretty cool, but I don’t know much about what other effects it would have. Hope this helps!
For currents at latitudes without landmasses, you can consider the Antarctic Circumpolar Current for research and inspiration. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antarctic_Circumpolar_Current
I'm getting the same thing. I created the Illustrator file as 14,000 x 7,000 pixels, drew all my coastlines, then decided to do a trial export. G.Projector choked on it. It tried exporting it at a scale of 0.5x, and still get the same error.
Just found this on the G.Projector help site: "If you use larger input images - maps 5000×2500 pixels or larger - from other sources, please be aware that G.Projector may encounter memory problems." I tried exporting with a size of 5000 px and it imported into G.Projector after that.
@@ayanhart Oh cool thanks! I'm between glasses and couldn't read the key but that makes sense! Although besides maybe volcanoes and craters I don't know how often they'd be around
Instead of doing it all over again, surely you could create a copy of þe map without any gragifit-þings, select one colour/height, turn it into a region and do þat for þe rest?
I'm re-watching this, and I can't help but notice that your mountains trouble me. I'm not sure of the scale, but they don't seem steep enough. They appear to me to be big and tall hills or highlands.
I don't understand the point of putting so much effort into the fine detail and construction of the pre-g.projector map, if you're just going ot make it all over anyways. If you can't use the full globe in an atlas, why even bother? Why not just block it out, make notes, run it through g.projector, and then apply the final 80% of detail into the atlas pages (post-g.projector)? I'm not seeing the benefit of having a super high detail map before g.projector...?
Why would you say that rivers take a direct path? I've always followed the idea that they only go downhill, and slowly erode bendier and bendier shapes. Also, deltas are formed by lots of erosion, creating new land while splitting off, so they typically appear as very chaotic regions almost exploding off the landmass.
Yeah, I don't think I'm going to bother with projections and global maps if the process requires so much ... backtracking. There has to be a way to do the G.projector step earlier and avoid doing so much over.
you might be able to save yourself from redoing it all again if you select pdf on the save as screen, but i dont know if it preserves the vector layers, or just the graticules and the like. edit: there is no way to import a vector image.
A couple of useful pints about rivers that were left out:
1. Long rivers like the Amazon or Mississippi curve quite a lot. If you measure a straight line from the source to the coast, and another following every curve in the river as closely as possible, it should approximate pi (meaning it should approximate a long series of semicircles on average). Some of this curvature will disappear on your maps, and this only applies to, say, the longest couple of dozen or so rivers in the world (as you'd expect dealing with the law of averages; the total length of all rivers in your world combined should make an even closer approximation), but in general your rivers should probably look curvier than your instincts say they should.
2. Rivers flow downhill. I know this was said, but it's a somewhat more profound statement than it might seem. While rivers do tend to take a relatively direct route to the coast, the important thing to remember is that rivers are non-sentient (our brains like to assume everything is sentient, and sometimes they need a reminder) and can't look ahead to the lowest elevation region nearby. Most importantly of all, they can never go uphill. At every spot along your river, take a survey of every spot immediately next to it and have the river go in the lowest direction; even if there's a valley close by that's much lower, the river will not go there in anticipation of a lower energy state if in means going the slightest bit uphill. This may change due to erosion over time of course, but the point here is that these small scale, entirely local physics dictate the large scale pi-approximating curviness of large rivers. Oh, also, this is why rivers don't split except in highly unusual circumstances.
TL;DR: Rivers with a short distance from the mountain to the coast are somewhat straight, rivers that go through a long plain zigzag *all over the place* as mentioned above.
It's worth mentioning that while slow flowing rivers curve a lot, fast flowing rivers curve very little. A region with a long area of relatively flat land (such as the central USA where the Mississippi runs) will have a shallower slope, meaning the water will be slower and it will curve more. An area with mountains directly by the coastline will have a steep grade the water flows down, so it will run faster and cut deeper (meaning it will be straighter). A good example to compare against the Mississippi River is the Colorado River near the California/Arizona border or the Nile River near Dongola.
I understand why we have to do it again, but Edgar. I am in a huge amount of pain in my heart.
The ambient music is a great addition! Unobtrusive but adds a lot of interest
when you said you're gonna do it all over i literally screamed
I already saw it coming somehow. So I had a pre-scream.
I felt like i was in a nightmare.
Hmm, if you're going to do everything again after setting on a projection, why make such detailed outlines in the first version? Wouldn't it be better to make the general outlines first and then detail them more on the regional step?
I mean, every detail you add in the previous step will be something that you won't have to duplicate in later steps should you decide to map out the same region in multiple projections.
@@Ivorforce except you literally will have to duplicate it, for every projection.
It seems to me that the problem with having to retrace all the boundaries could be solved by simply having a program that can so the projection for a vector graphic directly, giving you an other vector graphic. If that does not exist yet and if I had to make a bunch of these maps, I personally would have written a Python script to do this. Yes, it's gonna be a challenge to figure out how exactly a Bezier curve would behave and you would probably have to make some kind of approximation that still leaves you with a more complex file, but for me, it that would totally be worth it.
either that or just export it at a huge resolution if any program can handle it
@@1224chrisng That would not actually do the same thing. If you have a vector graphic, you can distort the lines as much as you want and keep the original line width. If you distort a raster graphic with these lines, the line width can change dramatically and this would look quite ugly especially near the poles.
you can select the colour in PS and convert it, then export to illustrator. I commented above with a link to a YT video showing the process.
I find that when looking at real rivers, If there is any sort of mountain range in the way, rivers will not flow straight to the sea. May rivers instead carve valleys and end up flowing into completely different oceans - The Danube, Mekong, Yangtze, even the Nile and Amazon.
Go watch the Niger river, what a strange course it has ;) It starts very close to the ocean, but on the "wrong side" of a mountain range.
It's particularly clear with the Amazon. The contributories of that river are sometimes 200 to 250km away from the Pacific Ocean. Yet, the flow over 20 to 30 times that distance to the Atlantic Ocean.
Rivers don't care where the closest ocean is. They just always flow to the next point that's lower then where they are. If they come to a point where every next point is higher they will form a lake and as soon as the waterlevel of the lake is higher than the lowest point around the lake it will form a river again and continues to every next lowest point.
Closer to (presumably) home for him, the River Severn is another great example of this. Despite starting near the north-west coast, it gets blocked by the Welsh mountains and so instead it flows east into England, then curves south and comes out into the Bristol Channel.
@@myquandros4129 i like when games nonsensically insert waterfalls from a cliffside of a tiny mountain starting from the top of the mountain...almost as if there were a giant leaking pipeline of water coming out of a rock. The mountain is never tall enough to have any glacial formations, and yet the mountains which are somehow have no rivers forming from it. It's like they made games to have a giant tap in a random place.
When I make maps I draw mountain range peaks and major'ish rivers first. Then I fill in the height layers accordingly.
That makes it way easier to make realistic maps where erosion has formed most of the landscape.
I don't know, if you do it normaly, but I saw that you tend to draw rivers over elevation regions that spike outwards to lower elevations (English isn't my first language, so I have difficulties to describe very well what I mean). For me it would make more sense to let them flow where the lower elevations cut into the higher ones - what you do at some parts - since water tends to 'eat' away land over time. Further, I think that rivers don't necessarily need to go rather straight - especially in flat regions. Some are quite bended and curvy. These rivers can often change their beds, for example through floods and other things - which can result into forked rivers or sickle moon shaped lakes near the rivers. But I agree, that a forked river arm may dry out at some point, since the river bed builds up sand and can cut of the water flow. On another thought, bendy rivers may be seem rather straight on maps, due to the scale.
I am in no way a specialist - so I might be wrong, but I thought it might be worth noticing.
Yeah, I noticed too that at a couple of places he had a river follow along the top of a ridge.
I miss the doobleedoo
Thanks for the answer Artifexian, I think I see the process now! Also, interesting titbit about rivers: the ratio between a river's length and the distance between source and ocean/lake has an average value of pi (3.14) on Earth, so if you twisted out all of a river's meanders into the same orientation, you would end up with an almost perfect circle with a diameter equal to the source - sea distance
..I'm trying to figure out how to use that info. So, if you could make a "string" (which preserved the length of the river but was laterally flexible) and then fastened one end to the source and the other to the "mouth", you could simply wind (meander) and fasten it onto the map as you have length remaining, as it will automatically give you leeway to place it dependent on your previous placements!
Very nifty! Now, is there a way to make a "length constrained string" in your vector software of choice?
Me: man I love worldbuilding but I just haven’t had enough time as of late to work on my world
Coronavirus: somebody say quarantine?
With very precise and unshaded images like these, there are vector interpretation programs that can take an image (your newly projected map) and automatically create a vector image from it again. That would save a lot of time (though I'm afraid I can't give any examples that currently work well and are free).
Try the peirce quincuncial projection to make it into a board game.
I tried it on a world map and it is quite interesting.
Ooh, an in-world boardgame with your map as the board?! The immersion potential here is just makin' me squee.
You can use the eyedropper to copy both stroke colors and styles too, and you avoud going everytime to the stroke panel
Really looking forward to see the correct way of adding labels and objects onto the map.
A month ago I had to create custom tiles of a city for a mobile app, and I basically re-created them every couple of zoom levels, otherwise it just didn't work, especially with labels and buildings. I suspect (and hope) there is an easier way of doing this...
I know this map is not about realism but about the drawing process, but it triggers me SO MUCH how he keeps making rivers that flow along mountain ridges! He said it himself, water takes the shortest way towards lower elevations, unless something is in its way.
Other than that I love this video, as always ;)
There are still valleys, trenches and cliffs that are not detailed on this kind of map. Some rivers travel far away from coasts because of such blockers but it all depends on the amount of rainfall at that point. Niger river is amazing that way.
While rivers will tend to take the most direct route, something to consider is if there is smaller topography at the coast blocking them from the most direct route. Meaning, if there is just a few meters of sand to sand dunes blocking the river, it may force it to find a less direct route out to the sea. I grew up near a river that gets within 340 meters of the coast and then is diverted sharply north by just a 3 - 4 meters of sand higher than the river surface along the coast. It then continues north until it empties into a brackish slough which opens up into a large submarine canyon. The new mouth has to be continually opened by machinery each year to stop it from returning to its old course because sand movement closes it up during the drier part of the year.
In G.Projector, if you turn off your overlays, change graticules, pick a preojection, set centre, etc, etc to something you like, you can use "Edit>Save Map Settings To Preferences" to set all maps to automatically open with those settings.
A note about rivers: rivers cut ravines. When choosing where to place the origin of the river, avoid putting it on ridgelines like Artifexian did at 21:56. If there's a spot where a lower elevation is deeper inland, that's where your river goes (as shown at 20:00). If there's a spot where two elevation contour lines are close together, that's a steep hill or cliff and the water will be pulled in that direction.
Great vid as always! I was wondering, will we get a new seasonbuilding video? Fell in love with axial tilt, can't wait what's next
21:50 Indeed, they would not be tropical systems such as hurricanes, most likely gale-force extratropical lows
Hi artifexian. Are you planning to make a video about this map going into details of geopolitics ?(like history, natural resources, cultures, etc..)
Another thing, can you overlay a country or a known landmass on the map so we get a sense of scale? Thanks for this amazing series
Tir Fuar, Tir TE, Oilean TE. I see what you did there! ;)
Bá Reoiteog...? In the Arctic? With lots of "Sea Cows"....?
Something I've found useful for rivers is that map contours can guide the path of rivers: if you've got lots of contours close together (i.e. a steep area) the river will be close to a straight line, if the contours are further apart, the river might meander more
Also, I don't know how realistic this is, but I like to have the rivers go down across a contour where the contour makes a v-shape, inverted or otherwise. U-shapes work too. Those are also the points where you'd likely have rivers joining into one
When a river cross a contour line, if the terrain is relatively steep, there will be a V in the contour that always (well, probably 99+% of the time, I have no doubt there's a few counterexamples somewhere) points upriver, never downriver. It's because the river erodes downward, so it cuts _into_ a contour.
It was painful to watch you manually set the width and profile rivers multiple times. As long as you have one of those rivers selected, all other rivers you draw will use the same style settings.
I think that’s actually what he did in the time-lapse.
That wouldn't be good. You want rivers that merge into other rivers to be smaller at their tail end than those rivers they merge into when they reach the sea. Doing them one by one allows you to choose the right width for each river and creek even if they all go to the sea without merging. They come in different sizes in reality and are therefore drawn in different widths on most atlases.
I'm rewatching this series and I think it's worth noting that if you use QGIS you can change the projection directly in the app without having to retrace. It is a bit more tedious to draw in QGIS but since it's specifically made for mapping and you can do all the stuff with attributes I think it's worth it
You could save time with the tracing part at 12:00 mins Have you instead tried importing your image into Photoshop, select a colour, which will give you a selection to convert to a vector path, which you could then export to illustrator?
It might save you a lot of time. and you won't have the internet screaming at you... e.g: ruclips.net/video/UxCHYxZXkEg/видео.html
Because you have a colour table, in PS, you could first magic wand the colour there, and then choose select/select similar which would give you your shape to convert to a path.
Just an idea/theory, but it should work (as they say in engineering on Star Trek) ....if you have PS.
EDIT: OR - Instead, of drawing a colour shape with the pen tool, then try the Freeform Pen Tool when making your initial shape, (basically draw a path from the start) then fill with the colour, ( or allow PS to fill it when you complete your shape) . ruclips.net/video/fSMx0yiW0Ew/видео.html ruclips.net/video/WOjpG9i5ZWw/видео.html
This technique does not seem to do a good job tracing the "rougher" paths created with the pencil tool. They convert to PS as jagged curves, but when you convert it to a path in PS, it smooths everything out, losing a lot of detail.
@@brianbucklein315 yeah , you're right there. I forgot about that, sorry. It's not perfect Adobe hasn't updated it since it was made so it might just work in certain circumstances. But some options might help - comes down to time invested for your work...but there are some other options...
Instead, of drawing a colour shape with the pen tool, then try the freeform pen tool when making your initial shape, (basically draw a path from the start) then fill with the colour, ( or allow PS to fill it when you complete your shape) . ruclips.net/video/fSMx0yiW0Ew/видео.html
but for the selection to path method...
1. Worth trying the ALT key when you click the made path from the selection button. It will bring up the "tolerance" dialogue box, set it to 0.5 pixels.
Then go to the Add Anchor points tool for the jagged edges - ( either this or you're redrawing it anyway in illustrator)
If your image resolution is too low the smoothing will be more noticeable.
2. Working on a higher dpi resolution image (usually its good practice to work on twice the image size you want for the final result) can also allow for these inaccuracies and might become unnoticeable once the final image is reduced to the intended size. When drawing the initial shapes keep the image zoomed out so you don't get caught up in tiny detail that defeats the purpose.
3. I hear Corel Draw does it better - they have a free 15 day trial so maybe see if that works.
If you are going into this layer of detail, maybe you should work with georef tools like ArcGIS or qGIS. That way you don't loose your vectored info when working with different projections. There you also would be able to convert your level curves into height maps or vice verse. That way you can extract curve lines from height maps, which will save you a lot of effort.
I hand-drew on on a sinusoid-like projetion of an oblong spheroid that closely approximates my very slightly egg-shaped world. Is there anyway to use G-Plates or something else to wrap it onto an oblong spheroid? Otherwise, is there any option better than trying to figure out how to do it in Blender?
I would love to see you do a map project based on a planet that is tidally locked to its star, and eyeball earth. I know you've touched on that stuff before but I'm super curious what you will create with all your knowledge on these subjects when creating a eyeball earth that can support life, and how the effects of being tidally locked effect the geography topography Biomes and where civilizations might arise.
Oh, fantastic! Don't much like the "retracing" idea, though. Gotta be a better work-around for that. :) Aloha īa ʻoe! 🤙
Hello, Edgar! Sorry to be late but I have a question: How do I flip the stroke’s profile in iPad Illustrator? Oddly as it sounds the iPad version of Illustrator do not have that “flip button” you used on the PC version. If anyone else knows, I would really appreciate an answer :)
I think illustrator is going on my Christmas list. Looks so much better than my attempts in Photoshop, even if it does involve redrawing the whole thing :'D
If you have PS, you could select the color with the magic wand, on the colour table, select/select similar, convert to a path, export to illustrator - or just continue in PS. No need to redraw the whole thing or even get illustrator really....in theory.
in PS you could keep drawing slections and converting them to paths. See my comment above for more info
There's a way of not doing it all over again: At least in Photoshop you can select a color with the wand tool which will make a selecting of everything in the same color on the raster layer. Then convert that raster selection to a bunch of curves and there you go, a group of curves needing a bit of extra tweaking, but without days of work!
Edgar, firstly, would love to get your thoughts on plausible hollow earth scenarios. Might be worth a couple of vids. Questions to answer might include: how would gravity work? What thickness the shell? How might light work; what stands in for the sun? Also, and this touches on this video, what differs in mapping a concave rather than convex sphere?
I notice you've stopped referring to the doobliedoo. I miss that. My favorite recent neologism.
Any videos planned on how to make the surfaces of non-earth like planets (for example gas giants, Lunar-like moons and mars-like planets)?
Map of a gas giant should be done extremely fast. :D
gas giants have no surface
@@landy4497 Yes, obviously they don't have a surface, I meant the cloud formations (eg bands, storms, hexagons, etc).
I would love to see this :O
Hey! Do you know of any really good systems for projecting your world maps onto hex grids for rpgs? I know icosahedral is nice and would fit very nicely. I've made some nice hex gridded icosahedral maps before. I've got a world somewhat like this one with continents at the poles and at the equator. I know it's unrealistic to find a projection that somewhat maintains shape, size, *and* directionality, let alone one that uses an unusual grid and coordinate system, but I figured I'd ask anyway.
+Artifexian Performing a bit of necromancy here by posting on this video, but I have a question: in the temperate zones you suggest using equidistant conic projection. In the course of making my own atlas-style map I noticed that lines of latitude in this projection are curved, not straight. How would you approach drawing the graticules in Illustrator in this situation? Is using the ellipse tool and approximating the curve by eye the solution, or is there something a bit more elegant available?
I agree with francisco; doing everything again after setting on a projection is a massive waste of time. If it's absolutely necessary then it should only be a general outline you can draw over later, similar to what you already did in G-Plates. Even then, you can still technically achieve a similar effect by just warping and transforming your topography groups in Illustrator.
I'm especially cross with this process because 1. this step blindsides people who, up until this point, were under the impression their topos would be final, and 2, even with a drawing tablet, drawing the different topographies is MURDER on your fingers. So I really wouldn't advise it.
Just want to say on the topic of hurricanes, if you're unsure which regions or climates should have hurricanes, remember where they hit here, on Earth. They form off the coast of West Africa every year, and they follow the warm currents across the Atlantic, generally hitting the southern coast of US. They also often form in the gulf of Mexico and generally will hit one of the gulf states. The islands are almost always in the path of hurricanes that make landfall in the US. But there are also many that just follow the warm currents north until they dissipate.
Look where these locations are on earth in regards to climates, and there's your answer really. Hurricanes form when there's enough rotational spin, pressure, and warm water.
Also, for credibility, I live in a state that tracks them all year as it can be a huge threat to my state, though...lol, many party during them. Some surf. Can't say my state has the brightest people lol.
Do you think you can do a tutorial using GIMP? It would be really helpful!
The conical rivers threw me for a loop. I can't recall any map or atlas I've seen that does that except for maybe near coasts and the Mississippi and Yukon Rivers. I can see why you did it, but it just looks kinda weird to me.
The projection suggestions work well for smaller areas, cylindrical for equator, conic for temperate, azimuthal for polar, etc...
What would you suggest for a continent the size of South America, stretching from a southern tropical area to a northern nearly polar latitude?
Is there a projection that would work well at that size? Trying not to break up the map of the continent since it's the primary area players will be adventuring.
... to speed it all up a tad, do you think doing the thinggy which selects colours to create shapes from an image would be useful when you're redrawing the map out in Illustrator? I'm not very proficient in Illustrator i havent touched it in years but yeah. Thats one thing i remember existing
That would basically save you a lot of work...
Good job with naming your maps in Irish
If you look you can pretty easily find some drawing tablets around the £20/$25, they're pretty small and by no means the best out there but it's not a massive investment and they can help you to decide if it's really something you're interested in
What’s your opinion on the Waterman butterfly projection?
Given you can import a Winkel-Tripel map in to G-projector, is there any reason you didn't work on a map set to this projection in Illustrator to minimise distortion? My workflow so far has been GPlates - export to image - image in to G-Projector - export Winkel-Tripel map - in to editor of choice as underlay to make map. I assume you could create a shape on the artboard in Illustrator that matched the WT outline.
So you have three kinds of regions with different projections: polar, temperate and equatorial regions. What about areas that are close to the border between two regions? Sometimes these border areas might appear in two different projection regions, and thus on two different pages of the atlas. How do you copy the rivers from one projection to another? I hope you can understand this question.
If you want to get a tablet and don't want to spend a lot of money try Huion. Their cheapest tablet is only 25 dollars. I used it and it's just as good as any of the more expensive tablets out there.
How would be the geography, the map, of a torus world?
No idea, but that seems to be the kind of case that would benefit from using Blender instead of Gplates to draw on a 3D surface.
Don’t know why I initially thought this was going to be about the sky survey atlas experiment thingy
Um... couldn't you just load the projection w/o the gridlines into photoshop and then reproduce vector lines via a magic wand selection, followed by any necessary tweaks to the vectors in Illustrator? I feel like that would be infinitely faster. I also feel like you could probably use something to warp / scale the original Illustrator vectors to match the projection while still in Illustrator, but I'm really only experienced with the pen tool in that program.
Are you thinking about water basins as you are doing the rivers? As they are the lifeblood of most and all river systems in a country's. As streams or sources of rivers aren't just random springs sometimes they are also water from the soil from rain..
Thanks for the video! I have a question, do you know a way to calculate the % of the surface of the world that is covered by water (or land)?
Hi Alejandro -Just another world builder here - if you are tracing your original shapes in GPlates, use the polygon tool to draw your land masses. When you have one drawn, you can use select feature, and then select the measurement tool. It will tell you both the perimeter and the area of the polygon you just traced. You could add your shapes' area values together and divide by the area of your entire global map and you would have your % land mass vs ocean. Not super slick but does the trick!
@@robandrews1106 Good trick! Thanks for the answer
I am SOOO glad my world is based on Africa and I don't need to retrace anything
I noticed that your rivers were feeding into the concave side of altitude lines sometimes; valleys would be shown by rivers feeding into their convex sides from higher altitudes. I hope I'm being clear; might be nitpick but it felt like an important detail to me. ^^
Great series, I'm pretty sure you are reviving my interest in cartography.
My only nitpick is that you say "orientate" rather than "orient."
What projection would be useful if a continent passes through 30° S and goes further south.
If say you already have an outline of your world: continents, islands, the general order you’d prefer your creation to be. How would you go about designing it through illustrator in this style? Do I simply trace out what I have and draw on top of it? You’re help would be greatly appreciated, love your channel man, super helpful.
Does anyone know what reference atlas Artifexian uses? I'm trying to follow along, but the atlas I found at the library is a little tough to follow along stylistically with
thanks! also that background music is good also is there a version of gplates that works on linux?
Does GPlates have an option for Dymaxion (D20) maps? If not, what is the best application for them?
Would you be interested in doing more space content?
That’s what hooked me and I’d love more
I have a bunch of questions, but I'm going to just start with one for now... How do you show sea ice in something like this? Does it even belong in this kind of map? I have a map with continents packed in the southern hemisphere but it does have significant northern polar sea ice - enough that there is a small unfortunate tribe of humans stranded on it! With this map, it would look like their home is just in the middle of the ocean.
It might be worth its own video, but I'd like to learn more about how polar ice forms and how far it creeps up/down from the poles. Is it just based on a planet's average temperature? I imagine the tilt of the planet is involved. Most of the research I've found dives straight into modern climate change which focuses more on the heating of the planet than the cooling of it...
Some applications (Like Google Maps) show increasing levels of detail as you zoom in further. It would be irritating, for example, to illustrate the entirety of the Mississippi river watershed in one map. If you drew out ever single little creek and stream that fed into the Mississippi, when you zoomed out it'd all be one big splotch. Do you know of any programs that would allow a user to create ....ah.. several instances of the same map, to achieve a similar "Google Maps" effect to hide or show certain details depending on zoom?
QGIS (free GIS software) allows you to do this by selecting how features display at which levels of zoom - but get ready for a learning curve :) I did this with one river I made up and drew it to high detail for a km or so and set the zoom level visibility so that once you zoomed past a certain level it turned into a line, and if you kept going far enough, it faded altogether. Makes you realize how huge the world is...
So, if you're just going to do all of your work on a computer can you just make different layers, one with the topography and one with the biomes?
I was thinking something along those lines, as well. You could, I think, just shut off visibility for the layers you don't want to look at, right?
Any recommendations for projections if you were going for an old-timey atlas look? Say you were making an in universe artifact and some of the more advanced compromise projections haven't been developed.
Probably equirectangular for equatorial regions, equidistant conic for temperate (Ptolemy used both of those), and stereographic for polar regions (used in ancient Egypt for star maps).
In the next couple of days I'm going to bite the bullet and get a better laptop (need one for university, anyways) and a graphics tablet. I hate technology, lol, but I'm going to try to learn how to use inkscape. I'm actually looking forward to making some decent maps.
put rivers in the pockets of mountains, as thats the low land. valleys between peaks
also look at watershed maps for some nice inspiration
Well, you've convinced me. This is too much effort to get into. I'll stick to Tolkien-esque maps, lol.
Heres A question Say you have Uruguay 1.4times earth size and Giants have formed a colony, question is Food source to sustain giant population in that region?, I thought maybe fish at first given the rivers and the big lake but outside opinion.
9:40 for the list of projection recommendations
Illustrator has an image tracing feature that could do the work of manually retracing everything for you^^°. I mean it's not perfect, but as you are working with a high-resolution image and you know your colors, it should be pretty accurate. Just play around with the threshold a bit.
Hello, can anyone help me? is that when I project the map in GProjector it still looks pixelated :(.
Fuck Yeah Winkel Tripel Gang!
I've been binging your stuff a lot lately, and am finding it very useful and informative, but I'm mapping a torus, so a lot of these programs for projecting onto a globe aren't really useful to me :p
For now I've just split the world into 32 trapezoidal segments, and am mapping on those.
Why wouldn't there be a tool that does the projections on the vector data? If anything it seems easier than doing it in raster
That’s where QGIS(or any other gis suite comes in). You could also do that directly using gdal/ogr, but the vector data needs to be in a GIS format. Just about everything can handle .shp shapefiles, which can be drawn and exported from GPLATES. It may be time for me to pop out another blog post…
OK so I'm new to mapping, this is probably a stupid question but: what are the projections for, why go through the trouble of retracing every single line? You've mapped the whole thing onto a globe in the first place so wouldn't it be fine without projections?
Rivers will meander depending on age. The older the river the more it will bend and curve on itself.
Since Artifexian brought the topic of deserts up, deserts are defined by their lack of precipitation, not by anything else. Is it theoretically possible for some kind of green region to exist thats also a desert?
@@brainzpvz2592 I mean, theoretically you could have a system of water filled caves close to the surface, and have plants with deep roots collect the water in question. If from there you had a water cycle with little to no percipitation involved, it would work.
Artifexian please show us how to make Hybrid type star systems with multiple planets having multiple moons in Universe Sandbox
I would like to make a map for a word exclusively made of islands, archipelagos, atols, and such. How can I make this? Only oceanic plaques? Is that realistic?
Actually, if I’m not mistaken, the area around Indonesia is actually a continental plate! This means that a continental plate doesn’t necessarily have to have one big landmass. A couple of such continental plates combined with oceanic plates could help create the different terrains and weather patterns as our world, while maintaining the aesthetic of a world made up only of islands - ie, you could have one archipelago have a more temperate climate, while another island chain is more like Hawaii, and still another has a Mediterranean climate! As for realism, I forget why Indonesia is the way it is, but I do know that your world just warmed up from an enormous ice age, and the entire world was covered in glaciers, the continental plates would have been pressed down into the mantle by the weight of the ice. If that ice were to melt all at once, you’d have a bunch of islands and archipelagos. This is actually what would happen if Antarctica or Greenland were to melt all of a sudden. Come up with a reason for this sudden warming, and baddabing baddaboom, you have a world of islands and archipelagos. Another option would be to simply raise the sea level, so that only the tips of mountains would peek through. That could be pretty cool, but I don’t know much about what other effects it would have. Hope this helps!
For currents at latitudes without landmasses, you can consider the Antarctic Circumpolar Current for research and inspiration. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antarctic_Circumpolar_Current
*mumbo for mayor?*
I can't seem to export to g projector it keeps saying that the image is too large
I'm getting the same thing. I created the Illustrator file as 14,000 x 7,000 pixels, drew all my coastlines, then decided to do a trial export. G.Projector choked on it. It tried exporting it at a scale of 0.5x, and still get the same error.
Just found this on the G.Projector help site: "If you use larger input images - maps 5000×2500 pixels or larger - from other sources, please be aware that G.Projector may encounter memory problems." I tried exporting with a size of 5000 px and it imported into G.Projector after that.
How do you represent land that is lower than sea level but not underwater? Like death valley in California?
There's a specific colour for that if you look at his key, he just hasn't used it in this map.
@@ayanhart Oh cool thanks! I'm between glasses and couldn't read the key but that makes sense!
Although besides maybe volcanoes and craters I don't know how often they'd be around
Instead of doing it all over again, surely you could create a copy of þe map without any gragifit-þings, select one colour/height, turn it into a region and do þat for þe rest?
Nice
I'm re-watching this, and I can't help but notice that your mountains trouble me. I'm not sure of the scale, but they don't seem steep enough. They appear to me to be big and tall hills or highlands.
17:21 alien crying
I don't understand the point of putting so much effort into the fine detail and construction of the pre-g.projector map, if you're just going ot make it all over anyways. If you can't use the full globe in an atlas, why even bother? Why not just block it out, make notes, run it through g.projector, and then apply the final 80% of detail into the atlas pages (post-g.projector)? I'm not seeing the benefit of having a super high detail map before g.projector...?
Did you make a game of thrones video?
Why would you say that rivers take a direct path? I've always followed the idea that they only go downhill, and slowly erode bendier and bendier shapes. Also, deltas are formed by lots of erosion, creating new land while splitting off, so they typically appear as very chaotic regions almost exploding off the landmass.
How do you make sure the map tiles with the other side of the map?
Go back and watch the first video in this series where he's using GPlates. It'll make sense to you then.
Yeah, I don't think I'm going to bother with projections and global maps if the process requires so much ... backtracking. There has to be a way to do the G.projector step earlier and avoid doing so much over.
you might be able to save yourself from redoing it all again if you select pdf on the save as screen, but i dont know if it preserves the vector layers, or just the graticules and the like.
edit: there is no way to import a vector image.
could you maybe lower a bit the music?