Mapping Thread

The smaller blue rivers (tributaries?) stand out. These usually flow downhill from mountains, and join together before they reach a larger river system, which doesn't shrink. From the looks of yours, there seems to be a river that flows down from the mountains, and then dries up, or... flows from inland, into a mountain. Either way, it's a little suspect unless you're setting this in the Murray Darling Basin.
Swampland is okay (if that's what the teal stuff is), but it should have more than one source feeding it. If possible, have that big mountain range in the east send another trail towards it, and connect the big river up to it instead of branching out into irrigated lands. Might mess with your roads, but that's nature.

Mind if I ask what program you used?

Ahh great. I would say this is a youngish to middling continent. This is taking place not that long after a pangaea like supercontinent has rifted into pieces which are now separate landmasses but relatively close still. The world however is old, I would say something like twice the age of the earth for a rough guess. Fuck it I didn't want to post the whole world map because it's largely ugly and unfinished but here it is for your reference. Clearly I've focused more on the mainland.

Oh in case it wasn't obvious those overlaid lines are the tectonic boundaries. For further information this planet is slightly smaller than earth, I would say maybe 2/3rds the size ish?

Here is an older version of the world map before I tidied up the coastlines and some other tweaks. But it has the tropic lines and stuff as well as the ocean gyres for reference.

Christ that's a pretty hi-res image. But that looks good to me, much cleaner than mine haha. I can't help but notice all your lakes are sources, why not have any lakes further downstream?

My concern is the following
> roughly 2x the size of australia
That small section is, by your reckoning, the size of Russia. Just doing a rough calculation here, those rivers almost be visible from space.
As for age, you're in luck here. The fact it's fairly young-ish swampland (so I'm assuming a fuckload of rainfall) means it's likely to have a lot of sharp dropoffs, which means delta systems aren't that uncommon. Your land is gonna have huge, sodden marshes near the rivers, and a ton of rolling hills near the tributaries. Think scotland, but a whole lot wetter.
Probably increase the elevation near the place where the large plate is subducting under your area (where the rivers are growing from) and make the other side maybe even dryer. I see you've done some already.
Also, tiny islands wherever big plates are moving together in water.

I mean I don't want to say Japan, but that's what I'm getting here. Super marsh japan without big hills, only sharp dropoffs and cliffs on basically peat marsh. The size remains ridiculous however, those rivers would just be insane if this area is twice the size of Australia, and zoomed out this far they're THAT visible.

sorry *half the size of Russia.
The land itself isn't that ridiculous in terms of where it's placed, but your scale is insane for the things you're talking about. Thinking just about the climate of Australia, something that big CANNOT be just a marsh.
The diversity of climate would vary waaay too much. If anything, you'd have mountain > fertile > arid > desert > ocean.

Hah OK perhaps I underestimated the size of Australia. I'll be honest that I hadn't fully worked out scale yet and was hoping I would figure it out as I go. As I said that map i supposed to be the entire world (I'm willing to add or subtract a little ocean as necessary to make it work but more or less as is) and this planet is intended to be about 2/3rds the size of Earth. So I guess you can get a better idea of the scale of that area from that?

As for how you described the area that is fucking perfect, that is precisely as I intended this landscape to be and you just painted it clearly in my head as I see it. Glad to hear I'm doing something right with my procedural ground up approach.

Oh and I made the lines that thick simply for my viewing benefit while drawing them, i don't intend them to be that large. I'd say those rivers are scarcely larger than the amazon or other large earth rivers.

How do you blend terrains together with Gimp?

hexographer

Oh boy, the best answer to that would be "painstakingly". But a more helpful answer for you would be liberal application of the clone stamp tool at a low opacity and fuzzy brush setting. Set the clone stamp tool to alignment mode so the source moves with the cursor to get more variance so it looks natural, and also change the source/alignment direction every once in while.

Also a good starting point is to take the textures you want to seam together and make separate layers for them. Then get a fuzzy eraser and just chip away at the edges where you seam together the textures, being sure to do both textures equally. Then merge them down, ideally to a solid colour backing layer that is somewhere between the colours of both textures, so you don't get transparency issues.

I mean really i kind of screwed up in the beginning by not making the base image a higher res. Those rivers are as small as I could make them and keep relative scale within the river. Those tributaries are literally 1 pixel wide lines. Anyway for now they merely serve to remind me of where they go, I'll make them a real part of the map once I feel confident about their placement.

Also I thought it was clear but that area over the mountains from the river sources is a literal desert. I don't know how you expect me to make it any drier. It's possibly even the driest part of the world. With those huge mountains casting an enormous rain shadow, far inland location, and low elevation it should barely see any precipitation whatsoever.

I meant on the left hand side/lower half of the continent, where the large plate is sublimating the smaller one where this map is set. It's quite dry already, but it could be more hilly.

Let's revise my earlier drastic overestimation down a little. The area with the rivers and stuff should be about the size of France maybe slightly larger. Still a pretty vague description my bad, but I reckon that makes more sense. I don't know why but i always imagined Australia as kind of small? Probably cause it's tucked away in the corner of the map.

Oh right haha, I see. Yeah i haven't paid much attention to that area yet but that's a good call. It's gonna be pretty cold there though so what little precipitation they get will likely be snow. Maybe a little rain in summer.

Two Australia's is Canada, all the way from Resolute to the Great Lakes. It's a big, dry, climatically fucked lump of aesthetic design in the corner of the map that's so lush and full of unclaimed property it's a shock no-one claimed it, not even the abos. It's basically colony bait.

Yeah I just panicked when you asked me about scale and I threw out a wildly inaccurate number. I will work out an exact area for this planet and that bit of earth once i get around to it.

Be aware about gravity too. Earth's waaaaay too heavy for it's size, it's because we have a fuckton of weight in the form of iron in our core. Mars has lighter gravity than us despite being the same size, for example. We're almost a heavy-world, that couldn't reasonably escape our own gravity well.

I hadn't intended it to be inhabited which is why I haven't focused so much on it.

Mars is a fair bit smaller than earth though. But anyway yeah I have thought about it and it's easy to handwave away a comparable weight to earth by saying there are more dense elements within the core/surface.