Terrain for Asian martial arts RPG campaign setting

[Teh Tarek]

I had a go at using Wilbur and Photoshop to create a terrain map for an Asian martial arts RPG setting. It's meant to be an isolated mountain valley that will be populated with noble houses (and their landed estates), merchants, monastaries, martial arts dojos, geisha houses, and loads of Asian-inspired mystery.

I like Wilbur for the realistic mountains, but I'm having trouble getting the shapes I want, so any tips or feedback would be much appreciated!

[Tiluchi]

Those mountains actually look great! I'm not incredibly familiar with Wilbur, but from what I've seen of others' examples the trick to having realistic-looking mountains is to have your input map be as detailed as possible going in- so lots of different ridges and valleys, arms of the mountain range, etcetera. I find that mountain ranges tend to look best in this style when they're composed of a bunch of semi-parallel ridges, with different arms and lower ridges between higher areas. But really, what you have here is great already, something you should feel good about.

[Teh Tarek]

I tried what you suggest, Tiluchi, but I'm afraid I don't have the patience to get the initial heightmap correctly detailed first! So i just kept experimenting with Wilbur and got this for my second attempt:

[johnvanvliet]

if you start with more detail then you will only need to erode a few cycles
a 2 erodes( no noise) , then incise and 3 erodes and incise and 3 erodes

-- just a setup in blenders nodes to output a heightmap and matching texture

used Gimp2.9.4 to bumpmap the texture with the heightmap


heightmap ran through wilbur

[waldronate]

https://cartographersguild.com/showthread.php?t=29412 has some good tips for working with Wilbur. The last one that references the discussion at (https://www.cartographersguild.com/s...ad.php?t=32916) might be interesting if you have a very clear idea of where you want terrain features.

The large amount of straight features at 90 and 45 degree multiples are caused by insufficient noise. I'm too lazy to start out at full resolution these days, so I tend to start out at fairly small resolution (256x256 or so) and do a noise/basin fill/incise flow/precipiton erosion/resample cycle a few times as described in the last Fun With Wilbur tutorial referenced above until I get my desired end size. It takes a lot less time than just working everything at the final resolution.