[Award Winner] Mountain Technique using Wilbur and the Gimp

[Torq]

This tutorial is an attempt to explain the mountain style I have used in the March challenge entry. It assumes a working knowledge of Wilbur and the Gimp.

I will follow a step-by-step procedure spread over several posts. In this tutorial the syntax ">>" will be used to denote the selection of menu and sub-menu items.

Step1: Creating the Heightfield:

In Wilbur create an empty map and change the size (Surface>>Size) to 1024x1024.
Then generate the heighfiled (Filter>>Calculate Heightfield). This opens the Heightfield Computation window. Change the paramters by selecting Ridged Multifractal from the drop-down menu. Uncheck the Spherical Evaluation box and hit the scaling button. In the surface scaling window select Broken Value from the dropdown menu. Then press OK and watch Wilbur generate the terrain.

Fill the basins (Filter>>Fill>>Fill Basins). Use the default slope value of -1. Next select only the flat areas of the map (Select>>From Terrain>>Flat Areas). Once again use the default values. Then add some percentage noise to these areas (Filter>>Noise>>Percentage Noise). Choose 2 or 3% and press OK. Deselect the flat areas (Select>>Deselect).

The next step is to run the erosion filter (Filter>>Erosion>>Erosion Cycle). Use the default paramaters and hit the run button. This may take some time depending on your system's specs. Close the erosion window.

Change to a grey scale map (Texture>>Grey maps>>Height Map). Then save the map as 16bit .

You should end up with something that resmebles the map below.

In the next step we will be using Gimp. You can either use your own heightfield or the one below.

Torq