Hi all. I’m incredibly new to Gplates, having been introduced by Artifexian videos, and I wanted to familiarize myself with the app.
I started out with a simple sketch with a singular craton, with an ID of 100. I tried to write a file based on the Artifexian advice - write inTextEdit, change to a .rot file and then import through Manage Feature Collections. However, no matter what I try the app repeatedly gives error messages of “error reading moving plate ID”, sometimes citing 8 lines even though I’ve only written 2. I’ve tried copying the formats from about 5 examples of rotation files to no avail. What am I doing wrong?
in the original videos he has the lines as:
100 0.0 90.0 0.0 0.0 000 !
100 1000.0 90.0 0.0 0.0 000 !
I’m not sure if that will fix you issue but it is worth a try.
Hi Ido,
As a fellow worldbuilder, don’t follow everything Artifexian says in his videos. His videos are reallly informative, but his way of using GPlates is a bit backwards, and it will make some things a lot harder to do later on. Worldbuilding Pasta has a much more comprehensive guide:
I don’t use OS X, so I don’t know how it handles file associations, but I imagine you can set it so that files with a *.rot or *.grot extension will always open in a plain text editor. It may be that your text editing program is adding formatting tags to the file, which is causing GPlates to get confused. What does the error message state when you expand it?
It’s better to use the new format GROT instead of the old ROT format, as it has a few extra features that make it easier to track and group motions (mainly metadata and comments). I’ve linked to the format description below:
If you want to create a whole lot of lines much more easily, create a basic spreadsheet and fill in the columns with PLATE_ID, FROM_AGE, P_LAT, P_LONG, P_ROTATION, FIXED_PLATE, then save that as a tab-separated values file and rename it to something like rotation.grot. The fixed plate is the parent, and so if it rotates than all the plates linked to it will also rotate proportionally. By structuring your rotation file as a “tree” in this way, you’ll be able to create plate motions that more closely how the tectonic plates of the Earth rotate.
Hopefully this points you in the right direction to creating your world
