Sorry it's been so long without an update. I've been working on the masking regions, as well as generating heightmap and elevation maps for each region, which is just a long grind.
I'm having to just guess the southern territories, I think. They don't have to be well-formed because they're essentially uninhabited. Eeach major region was named in "official" maps, but borders weren't drawn, and I assume they are probably somewhat contested, because in the books they were never really colonized, so I've allowed a lot of the terrain to speak for the borders, stopping at barrier ranges and land I can only assume no one wants. I don't really know much about how territory borders are drawn or decided, aside from rivers, mountains, and long./lat. lines. I guess that's all that's typically used though?
I'm also grafting on the detailed heightmaps. I'm leaving unimportant areas mainly unedited.
Planning on using these maps to make 3D terrain which I'll touch up in Unity later too.
This is not the intended appearance, just how I'm picking out the borders based on topology. It will later be colored, with a bump-map on it. I'll make a new map for each region. Again, I need to make a global heightmap, global elevation map, global climate map, global colored map, and demographic colored maps for each of the regions and the whole map... I'll probably have to make closer up heightmaps and elevation maps for each region too, for threadfall charts, but we'll see. That would be more work to throw on an already huge project.
EDIT: @ Thorf: Oh, thanks for that info by the way... the reason I chose the resolution I did was simply to keep detail from the original heightmap. Since I'm going to later use these to generate 3D landscapes, I might need as high of resolution as possible. Since I'm not sure how much detail I will need when I get to that point, I would rather work with a big file now than find out later that it's not big enough. I hear you on the unwieldy part. Fortunately my computer can handle chunks of these maps and it's easy enough to overlay them in PS. True that Wilbur doesn't behave dynamically with different file sizes. I need as tiny non-stylized rivers as possible, and I just assumed bigger file, smaller details. I'd definitely love to see what you are doing in Wilbur.
EDIT (2/13/2014): @Waldronate
That's some cool knowledge! I really should study this sort of thing more. Just makes me a little glad I'm not entirely relying on Wilbur at least. I'm trying to let the earth images speak for realistic texture, but then let Wilbur make it it's own land. Makes me worry that the terrain pieces I picked didn't match the climate of the places I was grafting them onto for Pern. Just went with what looked nice. :/Note that Wilbur is missing huge kinds of effects that would appear on the micro scale such as meanders or other effects that have to do with density of flow and with mass wasting (critical physical processes for real-world erosion). Wilbur's precipiton thingy is the simplest algorithm that I could get to generate something that looked reasonably plausible to me. Incise flow is just as bad in terms of having a physical meaning...
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