Getting back into it. A W.I.P. and a few questions

[Olvyr]

Looks like I've caught the cartography fever again. It's been quite a while since I've last tried to create something like a map from scratch.

I've been following the (hugely popular) Eriond tutorial for GIMP and Wilbur. Only I'm using it with PS, and I've adapted it here and there a bit, to account for difgerences between GIMP and PS.
I've created a map of an island and I think it looks pretty decent already (though it's by no means finished yet!) but I've run into a problem: the rivers have too many tributaries for my taste, and there's these flat areas in some places that look quite bland.
Unfortunately, simply following the tutorial doesn't teach me the ins and outs of Wilbur enough (and the program itself is not very... Intuitive, shall I say?)
Are there any other good tutorials for Wilbur that actually explain how settings affect outcome? I'm xoming from the artistic side of cartography not the geographical side, so some technical terms are a bit mysterious.

Anyway, here's my W.I.P. (along with its heightmap) and I would really appreciate comments and critique!



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[waldronate]

If you haven't done so, I recommend reading the "Fun With Wilbur" things ( https://www.cartographersguild.com/s...ad.php?t=29412 ). The Eriond tutorial was written before a few features common use in Wilbur, namely the finding rivers feature and the morphological erode feature.

Note that many of the terms are just as mysterious to cartographers as they are to artists. I blame the software people.

The river density is controlled by the "Flow Exponent" item on the "Incise Flow Process" dialog. A value of 0.2 will give you a high density of rivers, a value of 0.6 will give you a "reasonable" amount of rivers, a value of 3 will give you probably just one or two major stems, and larger values will continue to give you shorter and shorter rivers.

For you particular case, I recommend doing the following from your Wilbur map (assuming that you still have the original height data):
1) Select altitudes above 0 to preserve your existing coastlines.
2) One pass of Filter>>Erosion>>Precipiton-Based to break down the excessive hard-edged tributaries.
3) Filter>>Noise>>Absolute Magnitude Noise with a value of about 5% of your total height range to break up any flat spots. Note that this is NOT the same as the "percentage noise", which adds a different amount of noise to each pixel.
4) Filter>>Fill>>Fill Basins to reconnect all of the river basins.
5) Filter>>Erosion>>Incise Flow with a flow exponent value of about 0.6 to get a few rivers. You can adjust the exponent value and click Preview to see what the results will be.
6) Filter>>Fill>>Fill Basins to reconnect all of the river basins. This step isn't required if you aren't going to use Wilbur's river finding feature.

The Eriond tutorial relies on deep river canyons to give the impression of rivers. Since those days, Wilbur has sprouted a feature where it can calculate rivers directly without having to chop deep canyons into the landscape. Texture>>Other Maps>>River Flow gives you a dialog that uses a process similar to Incise Flow except that it doesn't use the computed information to modify the terrain, but just to color some pixels. The slider gives you control over the equivalent of the Flow Exponent value, and you can have the rivers colored differently at mouth as compared to source. Producing a white river mask (or one fading from black to white) on a black background offers you many options for masking and coloring tricks once in your image editing software.

a0.png

[Olvyr]

(Lots of immensely helpful stuff)

Wow, thanks a lot! I'll try this out as soon as I can!

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[bandersnatch]

If you haven't done so, I recommend reading the "Fun With Wilbur" things ( https://www.cartographersguild.com/s...ad.php?t=29412 ). The Eriond tutorial was written before a few features common use in Wilbur, namely the finding rivers feature and the morphological erode feature.

Note that many of the terms are just as mysterious to cartographers as they are to artists. I blame the software people.

The river density is controlled by the "Flow Exponent" item on the "Incise Flow Process" dialog. A value of 0.2 will give you a high density of rivers, a value of 0.6 will give you a "reasonable" amount of rivers, a value of 3 will give you probably just one or two major stems, and larger values will continue to give you shorter and shorter rivers.

For you particular case, I recommend doing the following from your Wilbur map (assuming that you still have the original height data):
1) Select altitudes above 0 to preserve your existing coastlines.
2) One pass of Filter>>Erosion>>Precipiton-Based to break down the excessive hard-edged tributaries.
3) Filter>>Noise>>Absolute Magnitude Noise with a value of about 5% of your total height range to break up any flat spots. Note that this is NOT the same as the "percentage noise", which adds a different amount of noise to each pixel.
4) Filter>>Fill>>Fill Basins to reconnect all of the river basins.
5) Filter>>Erosion>>Incise Flow with a flow exponent value of about 0.6 to get a few rivers. You can adjust the exponent value and click Preview to see what the results will be.
6) Filter>>Fill>>Fill Basins to reconnect all of the river basins. This step isn't required if you aren't going to use Wilbur's river finding feature.

The Eriond tutorial relies on deep river canyons to give the impression of rivers. Since those days, Wilbur has sprouted a feature where it can calculate rivers directly without having to chop deep canyons into the landscape. Texture>>Other Maps>>River Flow gives you a dialog that uses a process similar to Incise Flow except that it doesn't use the computed information to modify the terrain, but just to color some pixels. The slider gives you control over the equivalent of the Flow Exponent value, and you can have the rivers colored differently at mouth as compared to source. Producing a white river mask (or one fading from black to white) on a black background offers you many options for masking and coloring tricks once in your image editing software.

a0.png

Hey Waldronate! Could you give an example for the coloring tricks you mentoined? Everything went well so far, i got the river map, from a height map i made a bump map with gimp, it looks way better than the one with photoshop for some reason. Anyway, i put the bump map with the river mask in photoshop, added some colors and a relief, looks ok, but not good, the problem is that all the rivers are the same width, it looks kind of unnatural. I can imagine that this could somehow be overcome with the fading in the river map. For example, to increase the width of the rivers with the brightness or sth like that. The problem is i have no clue how realize that.

Greetings!

/edit i solved it: first i exported the river flow map.
Then i made another one with incrise flow erosion with a super high "amount" and a 0.5 post blur, and a high exponent.
The result were deep little rivers at the beginning and deep wide rivers at the end.
After that I made a mask with the incrise flow and the river flow map combined, since the incrise flow did not made the very small rivers deep enought.
It took some time but the result is pretty much that what i was looking for. Awesome software
Looking forward to get into FT3 as soon as the 2D Map is ready.

Cheers

[Olvyr]

Yesterday, I decided to create a new landmass and start from scratch. More of a continent, rather than a big, boring island.

Next thing will be figuring out where mountain ranges should be placed. I want them to not just be random, but actually make a bit sense.

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[Olvyr]

How would this look for the placement of mountain ranges?

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[Olvyr]

Well, I scrapped the previous map, the land outline was too unrealistic and too large. It was supposed to be an entire continent, but I wasn't happy with the shape.

So I've been playing around some more and came up with something smaller, scale-wise.
I eventually want to hill-shade this, but Wilbur is still very much trial-and-error for me. I think I'll have to really "paint" a DEM first before I erode it in Wilbur. Just doing a couple of clouds/difference clouds iterations is too random and leaves a heightmap that's too "uniformly" rugged. If only there was a way to "paint" ridged multifractals just where you need them.

Anyway, here's a preview of the shape.

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[kacey]

The new coast looks good, and the water is shaping up quite nicely.

[Olvyr]

Experimenting with ways to "paint" the heightmap...

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[waldronate]

As you appear to be discovering, you can paint with fractal noises in Photoshop. The basic technique is to generate a solid noise field on one layer, then add a black layer above that with the blending mode set to "Multiply". Then paint white into the multiply layer with a flow value of around 10% so that you need to go over the same spots several times to build to maximum height. You can also use another layer on top with an "add" blending mode and low flow rate to raise things up. A little bit of blur at the end will smooth out the transitions. I do recommend using a 16-bit-per channel mode for these operations. Save as a PNG file and it should go into Wilbur nicely with minimal loss of data.

You can also get the same effect by using layer masks to control how much the base fractal information shows through.

In Wilbur, there are numerous ways to get similar results. You can use any of the techniques shown in https://www.cartographersguild.com/s...ad.php?t=29412 to start with a set of black and white masks. You can also just apply a mound set to multiply (range of 0 at the edges and 1 at the middle) to shape an existing fractal noise field. You can apply the "Use Fractal Parameters" parameter in Mound to add fractal noise to an existing height field. You can use Select>>Modify>>Distance to turn your selection into a 256-level equivalent of the mound operation and paint things into that envelope.