[WIP] Castenet Regional Map - My First Map on CG

[waldronate]

The detail of the mountains look real because it came from real height map relief from earth data such as Shuttle SRTM or similar.

And that's the major weakness of collaging for terrains: terrains are defined by their drainages rather than their landforms. That is to say that landforms emerge from drainage patterns controlled by underlying geology and the landforms are joined by those drainages. If you don't get your rivers lined up plausibly in the collage, then the results are pretty unconvincing for anything other than very quick glances.
Montcalm's map looks very nice at first glance and individual subunits are all plausible. It's an excellent example of how careful selection and manual blending can overcome a lot of the problems that often turn up when people do this sort of collage. However, I personally find the landforms a little bit unsettling because the individual parts just don't seem to flow well from one to another. For example, there are a number of glaciated mountain forms and then there's that big block on the right that isn't nearly as worn. I also wonder if maybe there was a different scale used for some of the results? The top-left mountains just feel out of scale with the rest of the map (but my eyesight has been going in the last few years, so it might be me). I also wonder if the auto-exposure feature of the Tangram Heightmaps browser might be contributing a little bit because auto-exposure will tend to make things appear more rugged than they otherwise might.

[Naima]

And that's the major weakness of collaging for terrains: terrains are defined by their drainages rather than their landforms. That is to say that landforms emerge from drainage patterns controlled by underlying geology and the landforms are joined by those drainages. If you don't get your rivers lined up plausibly in the collage, then the results are pretty unconvincing for anything other than very quick glances.
Montcalm's map looks very nice at first glance and individual subunits are all plausible. It's an excellent example of how careful selection and manual blending can overcome a lot of the problems that often turn up when people do this sort of collage. However, I personally find the landforms a little bit unsettling because the individual parts just don't seem to flow well from one to another. For example, there are a number of glaciated mountain forms and then there's that big block on the right that isn't nearly as worn. I also wonder if maybe there was a different scale used for some of the results? The top-left mountains just feel out of scale with the rest of the map (but my eyesight has been going in the last few years, so it might be me). I also wonder if the auto-exposure feature of the Tangram Heightmaps browser might be contributing a little bit because auto-exposure will tend to make things appear more rugged than they otherwise might.

I agree with that, a way to solve is to apply the wilbur erosion or other form of erosions like world machine, gaea etc , but Wilbur allows for massive multicontinental scale, while the others , well I never got convincing results.

[EffectivePawn]

For the rivers, I'm not sure which way to go. Below are three methods I tried. Left: I played with the heightmap to get where the lowest ground would be. Middle: I hand-painted the rivers with a soft 3px brush. Right: I hand-painted the rivers with a hard 2px pencil. Your suggestions would be appreciated in this regard!

Attachment 134811

Here is where I am at the moment:

Attachment 134810

I love the whole darn map, honestly. I can't even tell where everything got stitched. I do think the colors should be a bit less saturated, but I am a rather dull individual. As for the rivers, I am a big fan of the look of the river in the middle. I think it looks better than the left, and is probably a better scale than the one on the right.