Realistic Mountain Heightmap Making

[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/