Map of the Day 17: The Western Hemisphere

You've all been very patient.  It's the weekend, so here it is, as promised: Calidar's western hemisphere.

Calidar's Western Hemisphere, Equirectangular Projection

I included the Great Caldera, which bisects the two hemispheres.  Its central location means it's difficult to split the world map in two without cutting it in half.  Note where the prime meridian runs through the Great Caldera: in Ellyrium, the Byzantine-like country to the west of Meryath.

There are lots of new names here to digest.  Eerien was introduced last weekend, and revisited in my summary post yesterday.  Omfall we visited this week, but it's worth going back and comparing its shape to the shape featured on this map – the Equirectangular Projection world map here significantly deforms the true shape of the continent, whereas the Stereographic Projection used in the Omfall post largely preserves its true shape.

The two as-yet unmentioned small island continents are the Isle of Obb in Calidar's far west, separated from Eerien by a narrow channel; and Lanmarroth, which is the largest island in a chain known as the Furyan Archipelago, curving from Omfall down to Mormoroth in the extreme south.  Lanmarroth is a mountainous land which separates the Sea of Aelghin from the vast Vengrim Ocean.

Going back to Omfall, the Taslan Peninsula straddling the equator points to the east, towards the Arm of Ule, which is the westernmost promontory of a super-continent in Calidar's eastern hemisphere.  In fact, Ule is one of three major regions/subcontinents in this one huge landmass.  Like earth, Calidar has more land in its northern hemisphere than in its southern.

This brings us to the end of this part of the Calidar World Tour, as well as the third week of Map of the Day.  It has been a fun ride for me, and I have really enjoyed sharing some of the things I've been working on so hard for the past six months.  Thanks for reading!

What started out as posting one map each day has grown to become a full article with multiple images each day, which is not really sustainable, especially while at the same time working on the most important and most enjoyable cartography project of my life so far.  I really need to give it my all, and there is an awful lot still to do.  I'm going to continue posting new maps to this blog – there is lots still to share on the journey to the publication and poster maps.   But I have decided to slow down a little, to allow me more time to concentrate once more on what matters most: making beautiful maps for you all to enjoy.

I promise to post at least one new article each week, and when I have time I will post more.

Map of the Day 15: Omfall

Calidar's western hemisphere is home to two great continents.  Last week we explored Eerien.  Today our world tour brings us to Omfall.

Stretching from 22ºN all the way down to 67ºS, Omfall is a massive continent encompassing a large variety of terrain types.  Omfall pushes right up against Eerien to the north, with but a narrow channel running between them.  This channel is known as the Aesean Duct.  The tropical Mareas Island is in the northeast of this map, between separating Omfall from the Great Caldera.  Below that is the Taslan Peninsula.  From both Mareas and Taslan run strings of islands which connect up with the Arm of Ule, separating the Calderan Sea from the great Penggelan Ocean along Omfall's eastern coast.

In the far south, the Cape of the Last Howls points south towards Mormoroth, touching the Antarctic Circle.

I am currently working to finalise Omfall's height map for the erosion process.  In Omfall's case, because it's so huge, erosion will likely take about a week.  It's important to get the terrain right before starting erosion, because fixing problems is much harder after erosion.  If we need to revise the map, it generally means going back to the pre-erosion map, then running it through erosion once again, which takes up a lot of time.

Omfall Mountain Design
Stereographic Projection

As with previous maps, Omfall's height map was built from +Bruce's mountain design.  The thick brown lines represent major mountain ranges, while the thinner red lines are more minor ranges.









Take a look at how the design evolves.  The first draft quite faithfully follows the mountain design.

First Draft

The mountain ranges are too regular, don't you think?  They needed messing up a bit.  This was done in the second draft.

Second Draft

You can also see some notes from Bruce marked up in the second draft.  These were areas to lower.  The third draft incorporates these changes.

Third Draft

The fourth draft, which I am working on now, includes the all-important altitude scaling of the mountains which I mentioned previously for Eerien.  Without this scaling, all of the mountains throughout the continent will end up being roughly the same height.

There are two more islands to look at to round out the western hemisphere.  Come back again tomorrow for a look at the first of these.