u/Kulkom

The intent of this post is to show my progress in my first ever attempt at drawing a map. This is only one continent out of four I've made. The first map was made by drawing a height map and running it through Wilbur then raising the sea level until I got a coastline that looked really decent. After putting down some borders and names on paper I realized something that bugged me; it reminded me too much of North America, so I decided it needed to be redesigned.

I got rid of pseudo Alaska and stretched out the landmass to the west. Somehow I think I subconsciously made Canada and Alaska along with Greenland again but I can't really think of anything to replace it with anymore.

I generally don't like thinking too much about tectonics as I am a firm believer of "Rule of Cool" so if you think something could be changed I am open to reading your advices.

As for lore there really isn't much of anything besides my daydreaming. The name for the continent I came up with is Farund. Verazond and Marinndor are two rivaled empires in an eternal feud for supremacy over the south. Verazond is an arid kingdom inspired by the chariot kingdoms of the bronze age. Marinndor is a naval force inspired by Phoenicians and Carthage. All the names are Wip and nothing is set in stone, to come up with them used the site feldarknames.com or Fake Word Generator and reshaped hundreds of words for the names.

To create the map I used Wilbur, Krita and Map to globe.

Saw a post about World Orogen a couple weeks back and decided to give it a try to see if it can improve the look of my maps.

It has way more map views than shown in this post like rainshadows, temperature, wind, pressure, currents. With the new update it rivals tools like Rock 3 in terms of generating good looking realistic landmasses. (Note: shown landmass was my own drawing, not generated by the site).

I chose this site primarily to generate realistic erosion and climates for my maps because it was getting annoying switching between Wilbur, Gprojector and Blender for my heightmaps and this is waaay more efficient.

World Orogens import map feature makes it so you can change the parameters in real time and see how the map changes. The erosion gets more realistic the higher you set the detail bar when importing your map. You can make the coastlines more realistic, mountain peaks and trenches sharper and more defined, add glacial erosions and lakes, and smooth out the terrain till it looks like just as you want it.

The best feature for me is the climate generator which is the best I found online, more indepth than Space Calc. It takes in account: rainshadows, height, continentality, ocean currents and more.

Overall it's a pretty good site for generating realistic tectonics, climates and great for playing around with your landmasses until you're satisfied with the results.