Help converting a stepped height map into something that can be used in Wilbur?

[Broadhead]

Hello everyone, I have a few height maps I've made in the azgaar generator, and I can't figure out to satisfactorily convert them into something that can be used in Wilbur to good results. I've been at it for a few days and I don't have a good handle on it. So far I have tried adding a lot of noise, blurring the image, painting over it with an airbrush and trying to layer distance maps on top of it. I have also tried a number of these techniques in conjunction. I have been able to turn out Wilbur results that come closer than my initial attempts but they have very artificial, unnatural elevations separated by artificially textured plains. Unfortunately I can't quite figure out how to turn it into something on the level of the Arsheesh tutorial.

Below is a piece of one of the height maps I am attempting to use. Hopefully it is zoomed in enough to show the detail of the terracing system azgaar uses.




And here are the two pictures I got from tutorials that I've been aiming for as targets.

[waldronate]

I recommend decimating your input significantly and then start doing stuff. If you look at the thumbnail for your input, it doesn't show any terracing. That's because the generator that you're using provides what amounts to a fixed-size sample, just not aligned to a grid. Wilbur is a raster tool, so reducing the input to about what Wilbur expects and starting from there is probably your best bet for good results.

https://www.cartographersguild.com/s...ad.php?t=29412 has some good descriptions of using Wilbur. The CSU Johnsondale link might be useful.
https://www.cartographersguild.com/s...ad.php?t=32916 shows beating up a map from Michel Beaulieu with Wilbur until stuff oozes out. I need to stop abusing new members, I think, because they don't seem to come back after that.
https://www.cartographersguild.com/s...ad.php?t=33087 has some good examples of starting from a hand-drawn contour map and then I started thwacking mbartlesm's map with Wilbur starting on page 2.

[Broadhead]

Thanks! I'll start digging through this right away. Your program rocks, thanks for everything you do/have done

[waldronate]

I need to push out a new Wilbur update one of these years to fix some annoying bugs.
The simplest operation might be to load the image directly in Wilbur, use Surface>>Resample>>Simple with new width and height about an eighth of the current ones in order to resize the image, then start the loop. The light-colored seas might make that harder in this case, so you may need to make a mask with an external program to simplify things.
Anyhow, starting with a small (350x230 or so) image and the rescaling the image at 2X and loading the original sea mask after each noise-fill-incise-precipiton loop iteration gave me the attached image. It also has a final exponential and morphological erode step to tidy up some of the noise. I cheated a little for the final image because I composited the sea and lakes back on top of the map to make things prettier and to hide Wilbur's inability to deal gracefully with embedded lakes. I also tweaked the gamma a little to better match the original.
Things generally match the original, but some rivers don't quite go where you might expect them based on the original results. That can be corrected by forcing the rivers into the terrain at the low-res version (cut a river canyon where you want it to go and subsequent steps will elaborate on that canyon, usually without ignoring it).

[Broadhead]

Wow, incredible work, I've been playing around with the tutorials you posted and while I've had some small success, I've gotten nowhere near close to this. I found the morphological erode to be a big leap when I started applying that. As for the seas/lakes, the piece you so deftly overhauled is in fact a screenshot of the Azgaar program open in a window. You can download the maps as SVGs with the layers separated, so I am able to take just the height map and superimpose it onto a black background in GIMP. Since i have the lake and ocean layers as separate png files, I intend to simply add them back separately as well.

I'm going to try applying the pattern you used here and apply a morph erode only at the very end. Hopefully I can get to the point you did.

[waldronate]

Morphological erode is a minimum function on the local pixel neighborhood, which is why it works nicely to get rid of the little noise spikes. Some year I'll get around to adding median, but probably not soon.

[Broadhead]

So I have been able to convert the azgaar height map, but it still needs a little tweaking. Right now, when I work through the Wilbur processing, I end up with sort of "pools" or very soft slopes surrounding my mountains, as opposed to the cascading erosion those highlands should have. Instead I seem to get greater levels of terrain irregularity in the flat plains of the azgaar map, some parts having a sort of "pilling". Additionally, the actual mountains on my map seem to "glow" compared to normal height maps, and their ridge lines along the range's spine are not as well defined. I think once I can figure out how to fix these issues I will come away with a very well transformed map. Its exciting stuff, we love to see it

[waldronate]

Are the circled areas showing things that you want or things that you don't want? The slopes around mountains are what you'd expect for erosion around mountains.

[Broadhead]

Ah sorry for the confusion, yeah I'm trying to figure out a way to change the zones circled to have more ridges.

[waldronate]

You would need to add more noise when you're at the lower image sizes. Alternatively, you could draw a selection around those areas and just add noise there.