I think I've got a good flow worked out, based on Arsheesh's tutorial and the procedure you outlined above. There were a few major items I was struggling with. 1) Precipiton erosion was carving huge cliffs on the coasts, 2) Incise flow/precipiton made very nice river drainage patterns, but too strongly for what I was trying to accomplish, 3) Trying to balance sufficient mountain erosion to make it look real, while at the same time minimizing massive erosion of my flatter areas.

I've precipiton'd about a thousand times lol! This is what I've done. First I used a completely blank canvas and selection areas as given by Waldronate...no use of noise backgrounds whatsoever. The mountain and hill masks are the same from my previous post. I changed the river mask to include only the rivers, no coastlines and inverted the colors. So, instead of adding 100 feet to the coast/river selection between each iteration, I actually subtracted 100 feet from only the rivers/lakes. Why? Well this prevented a continual build up of the coastlines and allowed a smoother 'beach' area in selected zones.

Also, I noticed my mountains weren't really eroding into mountain shapes, so I stopped adding to the mountain layer after the first pass. Instead I added to the hill selection which effectively raised the hills and mountain areas (my hill selection covers mountains and hills). If I started over on a new map, I'll probably make significant changes to the hill/mountain pattern...using a new brush pattern, separating the hills and mountains, etc.

The results are subtly different, but I'm pleased with it tbh. The river erosion areas are still slightly too prominent, but that's mostly a function of the color selection of the gradient fill. I'm currently trying to develop a smoother blend to even out the erosion areas. Also, this is still a WIP, so the picture you see is where I stopped after trying to add some beaches on the coast. I also haven't edited in my lakes, so the straight line anomalies you see in the river erosion are where lakes are supposed to go.

TOEL_06.jpg