Huh! I've never considered doing it that way before. I've got to try this now. Thanks for the walk-through Waldronate.
Cheers,
-Arsheesh
Thanks Waldronate. As you posted this, I was working through the Fun with Wilbur Volume 1 tutorial. I used a river mask on the previous post, but I didn't raise the mountain terrain, other than what I had already done in the GIMP height map. Let me play around with it.
ok...I think I'm getting somewhere. I really overdid the rivers on this one. Please don't laugh...and ignore the colors! It's really late and my eyes are busting out. Ha!
Base Image
River Mask
Hill Mask
Mtn Mask
Final Product
The only problem I see using such large noise and precipiton iterations is that I lost a lot of depth to the non-mountainous terrain. The rivers, however, come out really nice. Obviously, I turned it up to ELEVEN on the rivers, but I wanted to see what happened. Also, my choice of brush pattern (Acrylic 2) for the hill mask leaves an obvious mark.
Thanks for the help...I think I've got some good info to work with now.
Last edited by zukeprime; 05-06-2013 at 12:31 AM.
One thing that the Eriond tutorial does is to incise flow to run rivers. You can also use Wilbur's Texture>>Other Maps>>River Flow tool to create a river map that you can drop on top of the terrain without having to carve the deep canyons all the way down to sea level. Learning the correct settings will take a bit of practice because the tool's effects vary a bit with the resolution of the image. More precipiton erosion will reduce the hard edges from the masks.
Yeah...one of the things I'm struggling with in this process is exporting a decent river map that I can use in GIMP as a mask. Exporting the height map is great, but the GIMP color picker tool at a threshold of 15 only gets the major low-lying rivers and ignores the higher rivers/glacial flows in the mountains. If I color pick those, I end up with half the mountain selected just based on the color delta.
Anyhoo, I tried using the River Map option in Wilbur, but I end up with thousands of little rivers. It still doesn't seem to work even after a healthy dose of erosion, noise, and fill basins. For example, right before my normal 'incise flow' I'll try to generate a river map, it fails to produce the rivers as expected. When I immediately go to incise flow, I get those nice rivers. Obviously I'm missing something. Let me correct myself, I actually did get a nice river pattern once, but it was extremely faint (1px?) and I can't reproduce that result.
BTW, waldronate: I really do appreciate your help. I thoroughly enjoy using Wilbur to produce realistic terrain, and combined with arsheesh's tutorial it really is fun. I'm also an FT3/CC3 customer, so thanks for helping dev so many great tools.
Last edited by zukeprime; 05-06-2013 at 10:10 AM.
If you're getting lots of little river segments, it's because the river networks aren't connected. Try loading the coast mask and do a couple of basin fills before doing the find rivers. For some reason, basin fills don't seem to be generating a fully-connected network at the moment, but I'm not sure if it's a problem in my development version or the public one (I haven't looked at it in a while).
Fun with Wilbur, Volume 5 describes a way to get the basins looking like basins with a connected river network flowing through it. An important point of this tutorial is that once you get the terrain looking broadly the way you want it, you can generate rivers from a slightly different terrain and still overlay it on top of the main terrain and get plausible results.
The only part of CC3 that I worked on is a few effects. I'm just an independent contractor for some small things at ProFantasy.
Last edited by waldronate; 12-12-2015 at 10:56 PM.
I think I've got a good flow worked out, based on Arsheesh's tutorial and the procedure you outlined above. There were a few major items I was struggling with. 1) Precipiton erosion was carving huge cliffs on the coasts, 2) Incise flow/precipiton made very nice river drainage patterns, but too strongly for what I was trying to accomplish, 3) Trying to balance sufficient mountain erosion to make it look real, while at the same time minimizing massive erosion of my flatter areas.
I've precipiton'd about a thousand times lol! This is what I've done. First I used a completely blank canvas and selection areas as given by Waldronate...no use of noise backgrounds whatsoever. The mountain and hill masks are the same from my previous post. I changed the river mask to include only the rivers, no coastlines and inverted the colors. So, instead of adding 100 feet to the coast/river selection between each iteration, I actually subtracted 100 feet from only the rivers/lakes. Why? Well this prevented a continual build up of the coastlines and allowed a smoother 'beach' area in selected zones.
Also, I noticed my mountains weren't really eroding into mountain shapes, so I stopped adding to the mountain layer after the first pass. Instead I added to the hill selection which effectively raised the hills and mountain areas (my hill selection covers mountains and hills). If I started over on a new map, I'll probably make significant changes to the hill/mountain pattern...using a new brush pattern, separating the hills and mountains, etc.
The results are subtly different, but I'm pleased with it tbh. The river erosion areas are still slightly too prominent, but that's mostly a function of the color selection of the gradient fill. I'm currently trying to develop a smoother blend to even out the erosion areas. Also, this is still a WIP, so the picture you see is where I stopped after trying to add some beaches on the coast. I also haven't edited in my lakes, so the straight line anomalies you see in the river erosion are where lakes are supposed to go.
This is just the temperate layer, which I think shows the erosion in the mountains a little better.
Looking really nice zukeprime. With each new iteration there have been subtle changes that have improved the overall map.
Cheers,
-Arsheesh
Excellent work.
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