Where might I go from here?

[rbnvgl]

One year ago, I asked for help with tectonics on this board (here). Thanks to the answers in thread, I kinda tossed the idea of tectonics overboard and just started working, I have enough inworld reasons to explain away strange landforms anyway. I picked a regional map for starters and just painted a atlas style topography and a lot of rivers. The image below shows where I am now. It was quite a lot of work to get there.



I really love the idea of having a map this detailed, but painting a semi-realistic topography by hand is a) just impossible and b) even approaching it with my humble methods ultimately too time consuming.
The thing is also, I have six part maps of this size still to do, to get my main continent together. And I really, really want to get to climate mapping/city names/borders/roads/worldbuilding this year...

So I`m looking for shortcuts now, perhaps someone can point me in the right direction. I read some things about heightmaps and this wilbur-tool for getting height map/artificial erosion, and afterward to put the map into blender to get a 3D topography. That sounds tempting, to let the computer generate to a certain extent, but I don`t want to have too randomly generated terrain. I still want to get to choose where mountains/rivers are... I still don`t get if its the right choice, or if there might be other software like this.
I also think I don`t want to do an assemblage/montage of real heightmaps put together wih photoshop (I can work with Adobe cc, the image is from a .psb file with maxed out size). Someone will notice certain regions and make unwanted connections/narratives out from that and I also have some landforms not so prevalent on earth, like really giant craters/remnants of them. So I`d hat at least to take areas from heightmaps of the moon for that ones, or similar if I went that way...

So... I got a good start for a pretty map, but I`m rather clueless right now how to continue without loosing myself in the project. I hope someone might have encountered similar problems and got something up their sleeves. If its a paid tool, would be ok too. This map is a part of my main hobby project.

[MrBragg]

Wow, if you did all of that detail by hand that's seriously impressive!
For saving time, Wilbur can definitely help you out with the very fine details in that you can "feed" it a rough heightmap and it will generate the small scale features--like all those rivers--for you. It still has its quirks, like not really being able to do lakes in a straightforward way, and you need to give it a starting heightmap to work with, but it still could save you a lot of time if this is the level of detail you're going for.

[rbnvgl]

THanks for your reply. Yes, it`s all handpainted until now, cost a lot of hours of my spare time... of which there is not so much left. It`s the main reason I´m looking for a "shortcut". I`ll try to install wilbur (i`m on a mac, so I need to see how i can emulate it) and report how it works. I suppose it should be quite easy to generate a heightmap from the things I already got (like greyscale and invert it, maybe with a bit smoothened).

[rbnvgl]

Wilbur can definitely help you out with the very fine details in that you can "feed" it a rough heightmap and it will generate the small scale features

Seems Wilbur is off the table. Wine/Wineskin and other freeware to get win-software running on mac seem to do no longer function for newer OSx versions... and I don`t think I`ll buy parallels and a whole windows-version just to experiment with a tool of which I don`t know if I can make use of it.

[rbnvgl]

Just tried to do a heightmap with what i have and load it into blender for shaded relief. The result is of course "platformy"... but it really feels like the right direction to go. Now i just need a tool to apply a sort of half way realistic erosion to a scribbled heightmap without having to paint the details in myself (with my working speed, that would take another year or so i fear).

Another thing to find out is how to best match the render to the original file.

[MrBragg]

A blur or de-terrace operation would help with the platformy-ness of it. For erosion, there is also Gaea, though like Wilbur that seems not to have a Mac version. Googling heightmap erosion does come up with a lot of scripts that people have written, so surely one of those must work on a Mac

[Peter Toth]

Hello rbnvgl!

Very exquisite work! Looks very plausible and the rivers are impressive. Ditto for your conworld from the earlier post. Although I don't have very good advice on how to proceed (other than cities, roads, scales, etc.), I look forward to seeing updates to your project. Congratulations!

Peter

[Tiana]

It's not cheap but what you want is World Creator, which will indeed allow you to apply erosions to a height map and then export your new height map to pull into Blender again. That's the technique I used in my challenge map this month. World Creator does work on a Mac.

[rbnvgl]

It's not cheap but what you want is World Creator, which will indeed allow you to apply erosions to a height map and then export your new height map to pull into Blender again. That's the technique I used in my challenge map this month. World Creator does work on a Mac.

Thank you for the tip. Some questions though: I searched your thread and saw that you wrote you "lost" some island chains? How did that happen?
Also, the erosion you posted from world creator looks rather blurry in the bathymetry. Is that normal for the program?

Edit: Another question, the examples on their homepage look great, but they`re all rather small scale areas. Your map does at well look as being just a few islands. WOuld it be possible to do large, continental maps or would you have to assemble them from lots and lots of smaller pieces?

[rbnvgl]

A blur or de-terrace operation would help with the platformy-ness of it. For erosion, there is also Gaea, though like Wilbur that seems not to have a Mac version. Googling heightmap erosion does come up with a lot of scripts that people have written, so surely one of those must work on a Mac

I tried blur, but it either smoothes the edges... I think I can paint over a slightly blurred heightmap though. But that would also take a lot of time again. What do you mean by de terrace operation?
Gaea looks quite nice. I need to find something that compages it to world creator (with the cost for a third software emulating windows those two come near each other regarding the price). BOth seem to be better for smale scale regions though?
I tried googling something regardings scripts, but I`m not good with scripts/programming so I find it hard to differentiate useful stuff from stuff that`s not and how to implement it... if you can recommend something, I`d be thankful.