Design Planet - Quick Menu
Launch the application above and you get a a sphere net of lines of longitude and latitude.
You will need to click the 'cog' to bring up your toolbar.
To get started, use the tool to initiate continent drawing mode.
to create more vertices on a shape that has already closed off, try holding the mouse button down from inside the shape and dragging out of the shape to create a new vertex close to your drag action.
To remove a vertex. hold the mouse with pointer down on the vertex and hit the 'delete' button
If you have more than one continent shape, you can select which one is active by clicking in with the draw tool active.
On the active continent, (denoted by its vertices having visible squares) you can drag the vertices to new positions
To rotate your sphere to another position, make sure your toolbar icons are inactive (click the tool icon to toggle them off or on) then drag left/right or up/down with your pointer/mouse.
The other drawing tools are:
fill - apply selected colour to fill the continents of the background ocean
forest - splodges that create a forested effect on continents, note, when set to white, this is also good for snow.
ground - soft edged circles of colour
fractures - a mess of lines that can create the appearance of rocky terrain.
lineaments - a line drawing tool. Note that holding the ctrl key allows you to create lines with many inflections.
eraser - a tool for removing any of the above (note can be buggy in firefox, if element does not disappear then click tool again to force refresh)
Note, that there is support for CTRL-Z for undoing the most recent changes.
This is a drawing program, so the best way to learn is to experiment. Once you get the idea, try designing your perfect alien world. To save your work, use the "Export Points" button to get a JSON backup of your work. To re-initialise you work from a previous export, use the "Import Points" to reload your project.
If you want to work with the Earth's continent structure, then download the following file Earth Continents, and load these using the "import button".