Try as I might, I can't seem to get a map beyond the most rudimentary stages, so for now I'll keep doing what I'm able to do: make interesting heigthmaps. First, here's a canyon I made in Gaea tonight. I mashed three slope noise nodes together, sliced and diced, and came up with this: No masks, just a hgiehgtmap. If anyone wants to use it in a map, go ahead. If you want to monkey around with it and improve it, the Gaea file is attached. --- Post updated --- And another heightmap, which I couldn't think of a decent name for. A couple of parallel valleys separated by a mountain range could be a good place to build if you upsample this one.
I woke up this morning and started playing around with Gaea, and threw together something that ended up being interesting. This terrain combines badlands, igneous, and fault generators, with various erosion to add character. The end result is a shattered plain with a mountain range on one side. Take this and see what kind of map you can make. I've included raw and normalized builds. Edit: I didn't include a screenshot. Here's what it looks like with a sat map for contrast.
I am in the same boat. Thought about just releasing heightmaps with macros. My drive to make maps waned a few years ago, just don't have the time to keep up with all the update changes. Gaea looks pretty cool!
It's a cool program, but you have to figure out a lot of it for yourself. There are a few tutorials online, but the developer seems to have abandoned it.
What are the issues that you're having? I recently worked out (more-or-less) how to get the heightmaps into the game well. I have a youtube tutorial (it's really just a recording of me doing it). But I'd be happy to help with questions if I can... --- Post updated --- It worked for me. I made the base using a copy of the Automation map, which has the wrong textures probably. But take a look at the video, hopefully it will help.
I just glanced through your tutorial, and it gave me some good ideas. But my issues include terracing from importing terrains with large height spans, and most recently trying to figure out how to create a good forest rock brush where the rocks aren't sticking out horizonally, but are oriented to the local surface plane.
View attachment 853907 It worked for me. I made the base using a copy of the Automation map, which has the wrong textures probably. But take a look at the video, hopefully it will help. Glad it helped a bit. How high are you talking? You can set the import height (I'm sure you're aware), but I've not tried anything very high. For the rock forest, I don't know how to set the rotation in that way. I'm not sure it is possible. Using a good rock terrain works well though. Or you could create your map in blender and cut out the rock sections and import them as an object. All quite faffy though...
I like big, mountainous terrains, at least 256 meters elevation difference and 4096 meters across. I'm going to play around with L3DT some more, especially after seeing how you use the exports to create terrain masks. For rocks, I might try importing some ECA rocks into Blender and creating big cliffy rock variations out of them. Or creating round rocks, sinking them into the terrain, and painting them really densely.
