Continental Map - A Test to my Abilities

[Azhel]

Alright everyone, I'm having lots of trouble ATM.
I have absolutely no idea which style I should use. I was thinking about Sat-view, but I have no experience on it. I was hoping I could get some tips on how to achieve a look like this: http://www.cartographersguild.com/at...nal_clouds.jpg
Also I'm unsure on how to proceed with labeling. I've had problems with labeling in my other maps, especially regarding the markers. Should I go with elaborate or simple(if I do end up going with the sat-view)

[Azhel]

EDIT 4:
Tried a political style map.



The North looks like that due to the fact that a boundary was established in some treaty. The red nations are foreign-ish nations, like egiptian influenced and african influence, and they don't follow Western rules. The green nations are all under one big empire. The Yellow nations are lawless pirate lands. The Purple Nation is the invading force that is trying to conquer the blue. The blue nation is the greatest nation of all, completely isolated, said to be the birthplace of the gods, It's sealed off to prevent the "impure ones" (all the other races and animals) from getting in. They are currently being invaded from the East.

[Pixie]

Looks like you are doing it all at once... Tectonics, satellite view, polical/atlas maps... If you pull it off, it will be awesome.

[waldronate]

Some non-tectonic solutions might appear as shown below (the left one is based on the full multi-level heightmap that you posted first and the second one is just a land/sea mask and mountains mask colored with Wilbur's V2 shader). Search for "CSU Johnsondale" here at the guild for the tutorial for those kinds of landscape processing. The apparent feature scale is likely a bit off, but I didn't have a good scale to work with and wasn't sure about the projection.

[Azhel]

@Pixie - I'l try my best

@waldronate - Thank you so much for the render and the info, it's much appreciated. I was trying to copy and paste real world heightmap "bits" here and there but it was very time consuming and the result was less-than-satisfying.

[Azhel]

EDIT 5:
Been trying out Wilbur's erosion. Been failing and not getting what I'm looking for...

[waldronate]

What are you looking for?

[Pixie]

I think he isn't happy with the lack of lowlands.. but it's my guess

[Azhel]

Yeah, i'm counting too many "rivers"? I think, because some parts of the terrain are flatter than others, some parts have more rivers than others. (EG: the Bottom Right Continent is mostly a desert, so I'm guessing not too many rivers there.
Also Wilbur kinda made some small islands disappear. I'm guessing that's normal but if there's anyway to prevent that it'd be great. I'l try to make a map with coloured parts symbolizing the type of terrain.

[Naima]

From a previous post of Waldronate and my huge load of questions on FT I think that if you paint more dry area in the Fractal terrain , it will have less precitiptaion and so less rivers in the areas .