'guided' fractal terrain ?

[ravells]

Maybe putting the world in as a reference image and painting it in FT Pro might be one solution (I've never done it, so I don't know how difficult it is).

[HTBrown]

A couple of techniques I've been playing with:
1) RobA posted a fractal widget for GIMP that will fractalize a path. You draw in the broad sweep of the feature (coastline, contour, whatever) with a path or selection and let his widget randomize the boundary. It allows different fractal dimensions and scales, which I find useful - too many fractal maps I've seen on the net have everything the same fractal dimension. That looks okay for a glance, but if you look at a map of the real world you'll see it doesn't work that way.

2) Something I've played with for a map I'm working on is to draw the rough contours by hand. This allows me to place the mountains and river valleys more-or-less where I want them. I draw each contour on its own layer and fill it with white. I fuzz each layer with a generous blur and stack them up into a height map. Throw in some small-scale noise and run the whole thing through Wilbur's erosion cycle. The technique still needs some refinement, but I'm pretty pleased with it on the whole.

--Hugh