Omnipixil

Art, speculative biology/evolution, worldbuilding, characters

[jomindraws]

The next concept art for Jom'Gol: the Jomari High Priest.

The High Priest protects the true sacred altar of his temple with more than just spiritual power. High Priests must go through a brutal process to become worthy of being in such a holy place-- and worthy to defend their god's honor. High Priests are trained to fight and conquer pain from a young age, with their bodies becoming covered with lashes and scars. These are eventually covered with the holiest of ropes and wraps, anointed with godly oils that constantly remind them of the burning pain--and glory--that their role brings. Such Priests may not use their words in the temple, for a sacred place must remain quiet; for this, their tongues are cut and their mouths stitched together when they come to priesthood. Their secondary limbs and their "earthly parts" are also severed, such that they can be pure. The bright ornamental yellows and oranges of their gauze almost outside the spectacular golden headdresses, rings, and symbols they carry. Be weary for those that enter the temple uninvited... the strength of the souls give life as much as they can take it away, indicated by the double-ended scythe scepter.

[jomindraws]

Second concept sketch for the world: a Jomari Footsoldier.

In an imagined holy war, a Jomari Footsoldier bears his coat of arms upon a knightly metal armor. Still representing the old world antique values of fighting by hand combat, brute strength, and trial by sword, he also bears brand-new technologies birthed from the war. An incredibly crude, simple firearm akin to a prototype musket is held in his hand, adorned and decorated by various protective symbols, a bayonet, and a blackpowder horn. Attached to his face is a protective gas mask that doubles as a helmet, filtering the toxic chemicals of the battlefield via a hefty copper oxygen tank strapped to his back. Similarly attached to his back and his chest, a device feeds another gas through tubes attached to the sides of his mask. These carry the soldier amphetamines administered to only the strongest of warriors, meant to increase the strength and rage encountered in battle.

Again, obviously I have not come up with any culture or history for Jom'Gol yet, as I have a lot of other steps yet to go before I reach that point. This is however, just a fun potential concept I came up with for a war I imagine would eventually take place-- perhaps the conditions for this type of soldier to arise will never exist once I do all the culture and pre-history, but maybe it will-- it's just fun to brainstorm.

[jomindraws]

Sorry I haven't been posting for a while! Very busy here as I'm trying to finish up my commercial pilot's license + working 3 jobs. Here's some sketches I've done in the past that I will upload over the next few days.

Starting off: The Vitruvian Jomari. Representing the classic Vitruvian Man image with a Jomari body splayed out instead. Inside the shadow regions demonstrate some of the range of motion of a Jomari, including an extended head side profile, the bending of the knees/toe/claw joints, and the hands and finger joints. The positions of the shadow hands combined with the position of limbs marks out the symbol of life, as also represented on the left side of the body as well (symbol of life is obviously still WIP). Thought it was a cool concept.

[jomindraws]

VILTRUMITE JOMARI

I wanted to practice sketching my aliens more, especially the Jomari heads/skull shapes in different angles, and also wanted some way to demonstrate the male and female differences and age/horns/variations/etc within the species, so I thought it would be funny to use this Invincible Panel as a reference lol. I replaced all the Viltrumites with their Jomari equivalent!

Might end up recreating this digitally at some point but this was just a sketch I did during class on 4/23

[jomindraws]

Sorry I haven't been super active lately, school and finals and flight checkrides and two part-time jobs have been taking up much much much of my time, so I haven't been able to work on Jom'Gol too much.

Here's a WIP river map to keep you guys at bay for now. I have plenty more progress pictures to get up to this point here lol but they're out of order so I'll just be posting whatever I have the next few days + a few sketches I've done.

[jomindraws]

After some time, I've finally put together the precipitation maps for both Winter and Equinox seasons now!

Once again:

Pale Green - Arid Green - Semi-Arid Teal - Marginal Precipitation Blue - Moderate Precipitation Dark Blue - Significant Precipitation Navy - Heavy Precipitation

I think I've finally figured out about what each precipitation value means.

Arid - <60mm (~<100 per yr Earth-relative)(Sahara-Antarctic-Mojave)

Semi-Arid - 60-160mm (~100-300 per yr Earth-relative)(Outback-Sahel-Serengeti)

Marginal 160-480mm (300-900 per yr Earth-relative)(GreatPlains-Mediterranean)

Moderate 480-850mm (900-1600 per yr Earth-relative)(Midatlantic-Scotland-Appalachia)

Significant 850-1330mm (1600-2500 per yr Earth-relative)(Olympic-Congo)

Heavy 1330-2150+mm (2500-4000+ per yr Earth-relative)(DeepAmazon-Hypercane)

Now to get these values, I estimate the approximate amount based on the rough similarities to Earth precipitation types (rounding up a bit because Jom'Gol's humidity makes rain a little more prevalent), then finding the mm value of rain per year, multiplying it by the year length (adjusting a little bit for the day length, so about 1.6x multiplier), then dividing it by 3 to get an approximate seasonal value. Now I will move on to the first part of climate zones: Precipitation climates. These will later be combined with a temperature climate zone to make ACTUAL climates. I am trying to devise my own system, although its super complicated, because Koppen's system unfortunately just does not work at all with a weird world like this. Stay tuned!

[jomindraws]

After a TON of tedious work, I have got done ONE precipitation map for Jom'Gol !! This one represents the Northern Hemisphere Summer Precipitation map.

I don't have a legend actually printed on the map, but I do have it listed out here: Pale Green - Arid Green - Semi-Arid Teal - Marginal Precipitation Blue - Moderate Precipitation Dark Blue - Significant Precipitation Navy - Heavy Precipitation

While these don't really mean much but tell you a general idea of the moisture, they will get actual values later. For now, having a rough idea of thinking where Arid is Sahara-levels of dry, Semi-Arid is shrub/scrubland, Marginal is steppe/grassland or Mediterranean, Moderate is forest/boreal levels of precipitation, Significant is Pacific Northwest to rainforest levels of rain, and Heavy is even beyond Amazon or Congo levels of rain.

I do not know the levels of exact rainfall in inches or millimeters or whatever per year, as the year length is variable and other factors go into how these are determined.

As a reminder, this is JUST the map for Summer (NH). I imagine that because of the extreme tilt of the planet, I will have to also make an Equinox precip map in addition to the Winter precip map for Jom'Gol.

Stay tuned!

[jomindraws]

Currently working on all the precipitation maps lol, this rough version where its just the sketch phase is so messy and I have no idea how to interpret data crying

[jomindraws]

Alright, here's some simple-ish maps for the Equinox season, to represent air cells, prevailing winds, and pressure zones during Spring and Fall. This should hopefully make up for the drastic swing variation of the Summer-Winter movement! As a slight fix, and to account for the lag of the heating over the land, I've also included the Orange and Purple zones in addition to the Red (High Pressure) and Blue (Low Pressure) zones as well.

The Purple represents a conditional low pressure zone, and the Orange a conditional high-pressure zone. On a composite annual map, these are essentually just a normal H and L, however looking at it individually tells us how that could behave in a certain season. If the season in that hemisphere has JUST been Summer, the heating over that area, and thus the effect on the pressure zones, would be more significant in Fall than in Spring (the summer hemisphere is still hot and cooling off moving into fall). Conversely the same thing happens in the opposite season in the Spring, in the reverse direction (obviously vice versa in opposite hemisphere in the same seasons as well).

I hope this all works out and will help me come up with a solid climate system in the future!

[jomindraws]

Okay, not too bad to throw together basic air cell patterns and high pressure/low pressure areas for Northern Hemisphere Summer and Northern Hemisphere Winter. I've also labeled direction of basic prevailing wind for each season based on the rotation of high/low pressure and the deflection off of significant mountains.

I've realized enough to correct my mistakes from the last time doing this, and not following exact earth-tilt rules on a world with a different tilt than earth. However, in doing my research and my calculations, I've realized that the 40 degree obliquity of Jom'Gol is WAYY too significant to do all the data from just summer and winter.

The ITCZ moves up several more degrees than it would on a low-obliquity world, and the large mass of North-South supercontinent changes the heating level so much that the line sometimes moves all the way up to the tropics level (or even a tiny bit beyond!)-- which by the way, is insane on a world with 40 degree tilt (because the ARCTIC CIRCLES are at 50 degrees, only a 10 deg band of tropics!!) So much info on the offseasons are lost from this and are too important to leave out (Spring, Fall, and in-betweens). So, I've decided that I will be doing an "Equinox" tab on data as well. The equinox tab will both cover Spring and Fall seasons, and make up for the offseasons in between.

(Just 1 equinox is necessary, the heat zone will of course lag towards the preceeding season, but the air temps and location of Hadley, Ferrel, and Polar cells will be the same; Sum and Win are significant and potent enough that having 2 equinox maps would overpower the effects of both).

[jomindraws]

My mountains are all complete for my planet !!! Everything is all completed with the highest level of detail I can, and I can say with 98% confidence that I'm not going to change the mountains again. I MAY go back later and carve some of the lowland areas based on watersheds and rivers, but I may also move those to specialty zoomed-in area maps instead.

I have included some close-up pictures of a few areas on my planet that I think are interesting and have high detail. You can see evidence in these zoom-ins of multiple different orogeny types, including Andean-like subduction, Zagros-like uplift, Laramide-like uplift and pulling, Basin-Range basement block uplift, Himalayan-collision orogeny, old Appalachian-like fold belts, Altai and Teton -esque Slip-Strike, Old mountain core Ozark-like bluffs, and multiple others.

I'm very proud and very excited about the result of all of these!! Going to move on to precipitation maps soon (and quite honestly I could care less about the bathymetry sea elevation maps right now, I have enough info for basic location of shelves and trenches to do my ocean circulation for now).

[jomindraws]

Just a snapshot at me manually carving all my mountains on Clip Studio Paint for Jom'Gol.... manually is so much better for detail but MAN does it take a ridiculous amount of work. Worth it!

Doing highlands first, then low peaks, then the lowland regions, and then determining highest peaks.

[jomindraws]

And here's the rough mountain placements based on the previous paper calculations, of course once again adjusted as much as possible for basic distortion. Everything is just sketch lines and blobs right now, so going in to refine the actual highlands, then the peaks, then the lowlands. Much much later I will end up going back to the lowland regions (and some exclusive highland regions) to carve a little bit of land out due to rivers or glaciers. (For now though, I've taken a bit of a guess at a FEW glacial areas and carved them out already).

Refining time!

[jomindraws]

And here's that model... slapped onto a globe! My favoritest website ever maptoglobe is back online which saved me 1 billion years of work trying to get GPlates to work. As you can hopefully see, the distortions on the south and north poles are minimized as much as possible, preserving the intended shape of the Jom'Gol continents!! Everything looks decent to me, and the ocean is still like 3 times bigger than all of Mars, so I'm satisfied! Time to move on to transferring our super awesome realistic mountains....

[jomindraws]

NOWWWWW we're cooking with grease. Completed outlines of the NEW continents on Jom'Gol. This is just the lowland layer, closest to the shoreline.

In this post I have cut out the exhaustive 9+ versions and variations of this map that I tweaked due to geological errors I discovered and unfortunate distortions with the polar model. I have thusly fixed the distortions and it looks pretty decent slapped onto a globe now.

[jomindraws]

After some work, I have the preliminary rough outline of the new continents for Jom'Gol based on my new, more accurate mountain/tectonic information. For reference, I've overlayed this new one with the old map so you can see just how different it actually is from the original-- lotsa work cut out for me. (SPOILER: I'm posting from the FUTURE. I'll post all my updates for the next few days, but in reality each step has taken me weeks or months. I'm posting this from Mid-March but the next several posts you see are going to be the collective work from Late December to Mid-March, over 3 months of continuous work.)

[jomindraws]

Alright, enough messing around. I'm finally doing something with all my redoing of the mountains and tectonic info on my world. First step is to take this ultra-rough paper version with my tectonic snapshots and label EVERY mountain range on the planet over the course of at least 2 billion years of orogeny.

I've labeled every single mountain range, their age, and every major mountain building event (and what type of orogeny it was), and what time it occurred. (Tedious.)

In reality, every mountain range on the planet will eventually be named in whatever languages will be developed by intelligent life, but for now I've come up with a mineral-based naming scheme. Every mountain range is named after a random mineral or mineraloid, and every continent is named after a rock or strata.

If the mountain range splits due to continental division in the middle of the mountain range, I will usually try to split it into related mineral groups (Olivine into Beryl, Chrisoberyl, Peridot, etc.) and if it splits again I label its main direction then (Oriental, Occidental, Boreal, Austral).

Next step is to take these and transfer it to digital, REDOING ALL OF MY TOPOGRAPHY MAPS.