Mountain Ranges

[icfhoop 0]

Hello all, I am currently working on a map based on Western Russia. As most of you know russia is full of mountains and valleys. My actual question is, what is the best way to create mountain ranges? Is it betters to make them in wilbur, then erode them down once imported into visitor, or is there a better way?

Any help is appreciated, thanks.

[ProwlerWolf 0]

One way for me is to use photoshop to design a topographical map. Here is an example of a topographic map.

If you have an actual location you want to emulate then that will be even better then designing your own from scratch.

You take each layer (I used 20 meters) of your map and judge a scale from light to dark(light being highest point, and dark being lowest). What I did was for every 20-30 meters I increased the RGB brightness of each layer by a factor of 5. My map had a low/max height of -50 meters by 720 meters. The water level ended up being an RGB level of 70.

I used a pollygonal lasso tool and traced each layer over the topographical image. You can use feathering in order to make your edges more curved but it does not matter as you will be applying a blur when finished. In that case it might be best to use jagged lines or else you will loose detail.

Also its important to consider how many lines to use based on the height of your map, a greater number will mean a lower blur needs to be applied. which of course means your terrain will have more detail.

once tracing was complete I of course used the paint bucket to fill and moved onto the next layer.

Once finished, I applied a large enough blur in order to mold the lines together. Of course to add detail I used standard brush methods in photoshop to add features like better coastlines, flatter roads, lakes, rivers, valleys, erosion, etc.

This is just one method which takes a lot of patience in photoshop but I find it has the most pleasing outcome then spending hours in wilbur with sub-par results. If using satellite images for your sat texture then you will find you will get much better texture alignment with topographical maps then using satallite data method to create your terrain. This is due to the angle at which the data was recorded in high orbit.

I hope this helps.  

[icfhoop 0]

Thanks for the quick reply, but now im having trouble opening it with Wilbur. It gives me an error message saying that it isnt a grayscale image, when I checked in photoshop, it was greyscale, any ideas?

[ProwlerWolf 0]

16bit greyscale PNG image saved with no interlace?

I don't even have to open it up in wilbur, my terrains go directly from photoshop to visitor.

I use .pbl to import my terrains.

[icfhoop 0]

Ok did it your way and it worked, no as far as erosion for the mountains, about how many erosion cycles should I put on the mountains in your opinion?

[ProwlerWolf 0]

it's your terrain, what do you think looks good to you?

(not that I have ever used wilbur for erosion)

[fasad 1]

the wilbur homepage has a tutorial on creating eroded terrain -

Fun with Wilbur Volume 1 (using fill basins and incise flow to make eroded terrain)