Thanks for all the kind words. The strange grey area on top is supposed to be a snow and ice field. Its looks a bit rubbish though. I'll have to find some better way of doing it. The map is very "islandy" I agree. I alwats say "use your jpg artifacts as best you can". I think it creates the idea of a wild and fairly young coastline.

I think there is more skill from Waldronate in here than mine. The base heightfield is generated with Wilbur (Ridged Perlin I think). This was then taken into Gimp and I raised and lowered ground by lightening and darkening areas on the greyscale heightmap to coincide with the challenge template. Then back into Wilbur for some serious erosion. Back to Gimp and have a base land layer over a sea layer. I used the challenge template to cut out a land shape and then cut that out of the land layer so the sea shows through. Then I apply the eroded heightfield as a bump map to the land layer. For the highground I went into the greyscale height field and fuzzy selected a large area of high ground. Then a new layer and fill the selection with a light brown fill. To this I once again apply the bump map, but with more (about double) intensity. I repeat the same process with another layer of a smaller area covered by the mountains and fill with light grey. Then bump map this with even more intensity. You end with three separate land layers that you can merge togther if you want to. I find the best results are achieved with bump mapping on light colours. Dark colours tend to mask the bump.

Torq