Doloria -- Topographical

[Peter Toth]

Hello Guild,

Lately I've challenged myself to the task of rendering spectacular mountains, straight out of an atlas, so that I could commence with my larger ambition of creating an entire planet from scratch. Although I'm satisfied with the mountains in this project, I cannot help but cringe over the rivers--they look plain ugly. Rather than throw the project away, however, I have decided to share it with all of you in the hopes that you will find it interesting. Little by little, I'm learning the art of cartography and enjoying every second of the learning process!

Peter

[waldronate]

One way to keep Wilbur from routing rivers next to each other is to make a temporary map to generate the river image from. Blur the terrain to force the rivers together, add a touch of noise to keep the rivers from being over-smooth, fill basins, and the make the river map. The rivers won't be in precisely the same place as the original terrain, but they'll be plausibly close. You can also blur+light noise+basin fill before doing one of the incise operations to reduce the river artifacts a little - the underlying 8-way neighbors are showing as a preponderance of up-down/left-right and diagonal rivers. What you've got here looks good at first glance, but some of the artifacts can get distracting pretty quickly.

It looks like you're using a straight hypsometric (altitude) tint here. If your map style allows, consider a bit of lighting as a separate channel during compositing. Possibly combine the lighting with texture shading ( http://www.shadedrelief.com/texture_shading/ ) or ambient occlusion for a bit more visual interest.

[RobEm]

Peter, this is looking like a really good start! You mentioned your rivers, one thing I noticed is that a couple of your river systems, particularly the long north-south one with the lakes near the middle of the map and the system southwest of this, appear to be (new word for me) endorheic ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Endorheic_basin ), and I wondered if it was intentional that they don't discharge to the sea.

[QED42]

One thing you might want to consider is using a bump map on the final map to really make those mountains pop.