Realistic Mountain Heightmap Making

[SpacePioneer]

I know, it's been awhile since I was here last, but I'm here again and will probably post a lot more, but I have a question;
Is there any software specifically made for making different types of heightmaps, and of special interest, mountain range ones with realistic erosion? I want to be able to add them as part of a planetary heightmap or more than one per each, so I'd highly prefer it to be mostly or completely procedural and have options to tweak it to be how I want but this isn't completely necessary. I just want to be able to have usable mountain range heightmaps without trying to find premade ones on the net or have to draw them myself.

[Redrobes]

As far as I know there is nothing that creates *really* realistic procedural height maps of eroded mountains. But theres many apps which try and some do quite well though you can usually tell if you look hard at them.

For free try Wilbur and there are some free noise map generators out there which you can get some milage out of.
Of the paid ones I think theres L3DT, Terragen, Fractal Terrains to name a couple tho there are many.
The most realistic that I have seen would be WorldMachine. But some apps are better at some types of rock and mountains than others. I think thats the rub of it. I dont know of an app that could generate the grand canyon and some of those wind eroded pillars for examples. Theres plenty of procedural generators that use real world terrain as a basis and they can do a better job but thats not entirely procedural.

Personally, I like to take a large mountainous region of height map and blend a load together then make it seamless once and keep that on hand. Then when needed, apply it to a graduated mask. Making the mask by hand is a lot easier than making the whole mountain. So not procedural at all but it looks very realistic since it came from real world height map data in the first place. You can keep several types of seamless real world data sets for different types of terrain that way.

Found a link to a list of them:
http://vterrain.org/Packages/Artificial/

[waldronate]

For free try Wilbur

https://cartographersguild.com/showthread.php?t=29412 is a good starting point for this.

There are several major problems with existing terrain generators, in my opinion. The terrain that we see around us is an emergent property of several forces, all acting at microscopic levels. What software generates is an approximation of those processes (that is the software uses a model or set of models with very specific assumptions). The output of most software packages has a range of plausibility for the outputs.

Wilbur's erosion models, for example, mostly generate outputs that are plausible for the scale range of about 1 meter per pixel to about 100 meters per pixel and it has quite a few limits on the range of altitude variance over which it will generate plausible results. This range of plausibility comes from the models that Wilbur employs, which are basically the simplest thing that I could code for the kinds of maps that I was making (precipiton erosion, for example, is constant-strength materials and only nearest-neighbor sediment transport). Wilbur can generate fairly plausible results if its limitations are kept in mind. It can generate some marginally plausible mid-scale mountains if you're willing to phrase the problem in a certain way ( https://www.cartographersguild.com/a...chmentid=80877 from the Muna Workshop thread is an example ).

As Redrobes suggested, cloning existing terrain patches (especially with a texture synthesis algorithm behind it) is a good way to go if you're not concerned too much with river flow and just want to get results that look plausible at first glance.

[johnvanvliet]

waldronate's wilbur is a good tool
BUT-- yes there is always one

north and south of +60 -60 wilbur dose not work great on a planet map
you need to remap the poles to polar stereographic ( +45 to +90 and -45 to -90 )
erode then and remap back to simple cylindrical and BLEND!!! it back into the 16 bit or 32 bit float heightmap

it really IS HARD to do a map 90 north to 90 south latitude and -180 to +180 longitude ,and have it look good .

most of the time i only run 3 or 4 erode passes in wilbur, more than that it starts looking a bit obvious



also if you look at my examples you will notice i do a gama point move to make the lowlands HIGHER
-- looks better when rendering most of the time BUT is not realistic

recently i have been using Blender nodes to make matching sets of
texture
heightmap
and city lights - this is iffy??? still

http://celestiaproject.net/forum/vie...135033#p135033
and
http://celestiaproject.net/forum/vie...hp?f=5&t=17466
and
http://forum.celestialmatters.org/vi...4&t=830#p13877


also the OLD "fracplanet" dose a decent base heightmap that will NEED a lot of work to render well
-- the codebase needs updating



wilbur has some good spherical noise maps that can be made and with time mixing them into something that loos well enough

there is also the VERY OLD "libnoise" tutorials in coding
it makes a ok base map to start with



as for REALISTIC , that takes TIME a LOT of CPU or GPU cycles and tools used by geologists and researchers
there are 2 GRASS plugins that after a bit can be ran in Qgis but running GRASS is a lot easier
and you WILL need all night to run the simulation while you sleep
( work on SMALL areas while testing then use a big map )

r.terraflow and r.landscape.evol
https://grass.osgeo.org/grass72/manu...terraflow.html
and
https://grass.osgeo.org/grass70/manu...cape.evol.html
a good web site for these
http://isaacullah.github.io/GRASS/



or the " topoToolBox" for Matlab ( VERY EXPENSIVE AND VERY SLOW single threaded )

[johnvanvliet]

add to the other post and a few screenshots
this was created in blender and is a crop of a full planet


started with a 32 bit floating point heightmap scaled to values of 1 to 65535
imported into wilbur as a BT from gdal

erode at 0.33 and 4 passes with a 0.7 % noise overall