Wilbur and variable altitude mountains

[mosttornbrain]

Hi,

I've been using Wilbur to placing mountains on an existing landmass outline, using a selection mask for the general areas that are mountain ranges, then increasing the altitude of that whole area to something large (say 12,000), then running 100 iterations of erosion, with some periodic randomization and basin filling along the way. Doing this, I've been able to get an end result that is way better than any other computer program I've tried to use to create a more "realistic" representation of what started out as a hand-drawn style map.

That said. I'm curious what options should be used to get the mountains so they have more varied altitude. Doing what I described above, I end with will nicely eroded mountains, but they are all pretty close to the same altitude. Assuming I have an average altutude of 12,000 for my mountains, after setting that altitude, would it then make sense to use the "Filter->Calculate Height Field" option and add in some fractal altitude before doing the erosion? Is there a better option?

Thanks for any ideas.

Cheers,
Brian

[waldronate]

One option is to add a noise function to your area of interest (Filter>>Noise>>Fractal Noise is fast and has appropriate operations like Add) instead of (or in addition to) the base altitude add. Another option is to multiply the selection by the noise function, but that will tend to run the altitude from 0 to the provided element. You can use Filter>>Mathematical>>Calculate Function (Filter>>Calculate Height field will also work, but it has a lot of extraneous functions) to add an offset and multiply by fractal noise at the same time, but that's a little more complicated than most folks would want to get.