One thing that I see is that you managed to get a conversion to 8-bit in there somewhere (it shows up as the apparent contour lines around the mountains). Other than that, it looks pretty good. If you want the mountains to be a bit less pointed, you can try Filter>>Mathematical with a land exponent less than 1 (say, 0.75 or 0.5). This sort of exponent will make the coastlines steeper, too.
The bright white snow elements were done as a separate layer in Photoshop. The two images below show what it looked like without the snow and with the snow layer:
You can get this effect directly without a separate layer, but I'm too lazy to do the gradients and keep track of them. The snow was done using the sea mask shader with the altitude set to the start of the snow line.
An interesting (or disappointing) characteristic of the multi-level mask technique that I have been describing is that it tends to result in everything at a given mask level being very similar in height. Performing the processing on multiple scales makes a big difference in that variations created at a lower resolution will carry over to higher resolutions. The 3D image below clearly shows the higher mountain mask vs. the lower mountain mask vs. the basic land mask.
Nope, I'm stuck. Here's my height map. I think it,s good. I have no idea in photoshop though. Still using Gimp. Nothing resembles what I've seen. the land bumps, the shape of the mountians, still no rivers lolol you name it, it,s not there. Now I just keep getting the exact same thing over and over. I tried doing a few things merged within each other from different ways seen here in the forums. ok, time for diablo3 and get my head straight lol
You've got some serious posterization in the altitudes that concerns me a bit. I'm not sure if that's an artifact of the export process or something else.
Could you post low-res versions of your terrain masks? I'm guessing that you are using what looks like a set of dashes for the higher mountains and that might be what's causing some of the straight-line appearance. I generally try to configure mountains as shortish segments that meet like the arms of a Y (or W or some other shape that breaks up any appearance of linearity).
I'll upload then to my ftp tonight. I've tried limiting the range between hills and moutains also because at 500 and 2k I was losing to much erosion and the mountains didn't look like chains enough to me. You'll see a few layers that I've tried.
ok, here are the files. You'll notice that I have tried amny things inclusing multiple layers to have a better etension of levels anh high mountains but it didn't do squat.map.zip
I find that Wilbur prefers black and white GIFs for masks instead of PNGs with transparency. I made that change, upsized the land mask to 4780x5150, and output a black and white image of that. The edges are a bit screwy on the coast mask, but that can be rectified later by running a precipiton erosion step on the final result after forcing the ocean levels to about -10 or so.
I started with a 478x515 image and filled the coastline to 100, hills to 500, and mountains to 1000.
Then noise at 50, fill basins, incise flow (amount=2, exponent=0.2), and about 50 passes of precipiton erosion.
Then I started the resample (twice as wide and high)/noise (20)/incise flow (amount=2, exponent=0.2)/precipiton erosion (5 or 10 passes) until the size was 3824x4120 (3 total loops). I also did the coast masking step (load coast selection, invert, set value at -5, load coast selection) at each iteration.
After the final erosion step, I did a morphological erode to get rid of the tiny noise blebs everywhere.
Then a little noise (5), fill basins, incise flow (amount=1, exponent=0.4), and fill basins again to get the delicate details etched into the terrain.
I put the work outputs from this effort at http://fracterra.com/kryox if you'd like to take a look. r.mdr is the terrain straight out of Wilbur, Untitled-1.jpg is the 3D view to see the altitude variation, res0.png is a lighted/river output directly from Wilbur with no intermediate effects, and the other elements are things that could be assembled into a pretty picture if desired.
to bad I was away tonight. I'll take a deeper look tomorrow. ty very much to you guys. I'm learning a lot.
slowly. still a ways to go but getting there. trying to find a way to change colors properly in certain setions and still look merged togehter and not just smudging. changed the green texture and water. to dark?
ok, didn't get time to touch it yet. I'll have to work on the mountians. they look to round around the edges.
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