I'll try posting my progress as I go, so far I'm progressing at a rate of about 50 million years per day. We'll have our first collision soon! I'm having a blast simulating this and can't wait to see the final thing c:
PS: next post right after this one is another video but showing the actual tectonic plates!
If you're curious about how to do the same, the software used is GPlates (and it's FOSS!) which is notoriously complicated and unintuitive but honestly, after playing around in it for a week or so, and making a demo planet first, I now quite enjoy working in it.
A word of advice: learn Topologies!!! It will not only save you immense amounts of time and tedious mouse clicks, but will also result in super clean geometries that match up perfectly at the edges (so no gaps or overlaps between shapes that are supposed to be glued to each other).
Other than that, two amazing resources/guides covering all that you'll ever need to know for making a fictional plate tectonics history:
Worldbuilding Pasta: Plate tectonics – this will teach you how tectonics work, aka how to know what to do in every situation you might encounter during your simulation (what if two subduction zones collide? what can cause a continent to break up? etc)
Worldbuilding Pasta: GPlates tutorial – this is the technical side, how to use the software and how to model the stuff shown in the first post inside GPlates
Artifexian: GPlates series – this is the same as the tutorial above but in video format; I personally followed both at the same time to get the best of both worlds, and also there are some little useful things that are in one format but not the other
Feel free to ask if you need any help c:
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