Proof That John Has Too Much Time On His Hands

[Spokane Flyboy]

This is something I imagine Jeff will enjoy. I've been working on back-story for a potential writing/role-play setting and after about a year of tinkering and picking up tips and tricks, I've finally produced a fictional planet that I like. I created it via a combination of AstroSynthesis, Fractal Terrains, and Wilbur. The mock orbital photo was created in GIMP with the sphere maps from Fractal Terrains.

Here's the link: GJ_338_B_II

Eventually, I'll fill out more of the page, but the different images are — respectively — the surface as it would appear to the naked eye, a topographic depiction of altitude, average temperature, and average rainfall.

I should also mention, that clicking on any of the graphics will take you to the larger versions.

[Teskas]

Wow, John, that is about the coolest thing I've seen all year! Long may you have free time.

[Divides the Waters]

I really need to learn how to use these mapmaking programs. Doing it by hand just isn't cutting it.

[Spokane Flyboy]

They're not terribly hard to use. A lot of tutorials are around on the internet and you eventually play with the tutorials and come up with your own brand of methods. I liked how some parts of tutorials worked better than I did others and just played with the combinations. With that planet there, I still need to do some playing with climates. As you can see, the climate is mostly uniform with latitude and altitude and some noise added to simulate micro climates. It takes no account for wind and sea currents playing and will require tweaking on my using the "paint" tools to smudge, raise, and lower rainfall and temperature data and create rain shadows and other effects terrain and wind cause. The trouble is finding easy to understand concepts for this mathematically handicapped man to understand what effects Coriolis and such would play on a planet of its size.