[WIP] Atlas Maps of Valmere | From Real-World Height Data to Vector Map

[morne]

I started creating my own custom heightmap based on this tutorial and others scattered around the forums and finding it much harder than I thought. I figured it would be easy to recreate the workflow I used for the images in the previous post, which also uses real world data, but no. Some of the relief (generated with Contour-Polygons) looks ok but most of the contours themselves make so sense.

Heightmap in Wilbur
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Contour Polygons
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Some real ugly contour lines at the coast
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The main issue here is adjusting for the coastline. You should be deciding what your "sea level" is in grayscale, and making sure that you are tapering off your coasts. It looks like you are doing that a little bit, but it's a very uniform and dramatic taper. If you look at real-world coastlines, it's more varied than that. If you do want certain parts of the coast to be steep/cliff-like, I've also found that doing targeted erosion in those areas can really help make it look more realistic and match the coastline a little bit better.

I'm working on a map right now where I did just that:

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The above map is a mountainous region with fjords similar to Norway. When I first put DEM data in, the terrain didn't really match the fjords of the coastline. So I took it into an erosion tool and targeted erosion around the coastline to make it match up

You can create masks to erode in Wilbur. You don't have a scale in your maps, but the colors suggest you have pretty high elevations. Remember, 90% of Earth's topography is below 3000 meters (as a rough estimate. Parts of high elevation should be carefully placed.

One other thing that might help is taking your time and using smaller bits of data. In your example above, it looks like you've used entire chunks of data that represent your entire island/continent (Even if you didn't do this, the following advice is still useful). I would recommend being more selective and cutting, rotating, and blending data that conforms more closely to the plan you have for your terrain/coastline. Working out a rough tectonic layout (doesn't need to be detailed by any means) can be extremely helpful for determining where to place mountainous regions, instead of placing them haphazardly.