Best way to go about making a Biome Map?

[CoriW]

Hello, I've been working on a Kopernicus planet for about a week now and I finally have the planet to the point that I'm mostly happy with it. So I've decided it's time to start working on the biome map and well, I was sort of wondering if anyone has any tips or advice they can share about making a Biome Map. Are there any specific programs I should use, or tools I could utilize in order to make the process a bit easier, because I mean it would be torture to have to manually specify everything on a 4k map.

To put into perspective what I'm working with, here's the height map. Just looking at the mountain ranges alone has me scratching my head as to how to go about assigning biomes to them.

[NecroBones]

I guess it really depends on how you want to divide up the biomes. An easy method would be to ignore the terrain features, and divide it up regionally. Another might be to use Photoshop (or GIMP or whatever) to reduce the height map's color depth to maybe 4 or 8 shades, increase back to full RGB, and then mask and flood-fill some of those regionally, and you'd get both region and altitude information.

[CoriW]

I guess it really depends on how you want to divide up the biomes. An easy method would be to ignore the terrain features, and divide it up regionally. Another might be to use Photoshop (or GIMP or whatever) to reduce the height map's color depth to maybe 4 or 8 shades, increase back to full RGB, and then mask and flood-fill some of those regionally, and you'd get both region and altitude information.

Hey thanks so much for the Advice man! Did exactly what you said, ended up changing the height maps color depth to 8 which has given just the right amount of control over terrain specified biomes without it being unmanageable.

I do have one other question... I've been working on my biome map and have come up with the ideas for all the biomes and well, between regional and terrain specified biomes, there's 18. That's more than any of the stock planets, so the question -- Is that a good or bad idea?

EDIT: Was thinking about it... The pro's seem to be that it would give people more reason to go to the planet and there would be lots of playability value as there would be a lot of science to gather, the cons would be that there is too much science available thus making my planet "overpowered" for science when compared to the stock planets. Then again at the same time usually by the time people get out of Kerbin SOI they already have a good chunk of the tech tree unlocked and its not long after they leave Kerbin SOI that it is fully unlocked.

One thing that I suppose I could do as well with the number of biomes the planet will have is lower the science values for the planet. The pro's of doing so is that there wouldn't be as many science points to get from the planet as a whole making it less overpowered compared to stock planets, however the cons are that each landing site gives less science individually making people less inclined to put in the effort to go there.

Edited September 5, 2015 by CoriW

[InterstellarOrbit]

Wouldn't be hard to make custom biomes for Craters and Such?