It’s been a while since my last post where I discussed starting the worldbuilding for my book. I didn’t mean for there to be such a long break - I really was trying to stick to a once-per-week pace with my posts - but I got stuck. There’s a really cool tool called GPlates that is a program designed for geologists to simulate and study Earth’s plate tectonics. It’s naturally built by engineer-types for geologists who both understand all the geology concepts and have a focus on creating highly accurate mapping. All that is to say that the UI is not great.
I found a few online tutorials and got to work. The basics were pretty straightforward, but as things started getting complex - continents merging and splitting, and plates disappearing or beginning anew - it started to become unruly. Since I wasn’t trying to go for hyper realism, mostly just wanting the planet to seem realistic enough to not trigger my pet peeves in fantasy writing, I focused on just creating some realistic continent interactions and designs.
After working a few simulations in GPlates, I was able to come up with the basic outline of two continents and the various features that would occur naturally. I took those and sketched them out, scanned them into the computer, then “traced” over them in Photoshop to create my digitized outline.
I am not a digital artist, nor do I play one on TV, but I can follow YouTube tutorials. Doing that, I was able to create realistic looking continents that followed my general outlines. It was nice to be able to extrapolate some boundaries, while also simulating continental crust that had highs and lows - and see that translate into islands and squirrely-looking coastlines.
I have more to do, at least two more continents for sure and probably some other features resulting from tectonic activity such as island chains and microcontinents, but these two continents will certainly suffice for now while I work on the rest.
