Easy way to add countour/elevation lines

[redleg7]

Here's a link to some of my older maps.

http://followme.prowargames.com/screenshots.html

I need to generate terrain that scales to 1-50km. Wilbur and FT seem more suitable for larger areas. We mainly fight in a 1-5km area but I can see us maneuvering in 20-50 km areas once we scale the game to company level. I typically create maps where 1px = 1m. My biggest sticking point used to be my trees or forest areas but I'm fairly satisfied with my current technique. I want to improve my hills and make them look more natural. I've been experimenting with randomly generated elevations using the clouds filter but I keep getting the same effect as Wilbur or FT. Looks good for larger scale maps but not so good for my scale. One of my requirements is to show elevation lines which is why the hills in my screenshots look like multi-layered cakes. I'd like to smooth out that stair-step look and achieve smoother transition between elevations. The other problem with my hills is the base layer doesn't look very natural, it doesn't buildup naturally.

[waldronate]

You did look at the Fun With Wilbur set of tutorials, correct? ( http://www.ridgenet.net/~jslayton/FunWithWilburVol1/ is the first; the rest can be accessed from the main Wilbur page). I ask this because Wilbur can easily generate features that look suspiciously like local to mid-scale terrain with relative ease. It also has a contour shader to show contour lines from these height fields. I need to do an example tutorial that shows how to bake predefined features into the terrain such as rivers but place them in such a way that they correctly add to lower-level setup to get rivers that aren't all at one elevation.

The attached image shows a terrain generated in Wilbur with a smoothed contour map laid over the top of it in Photoshop (mild outer glow in black on the contours to make them stand out a little).

One of these years I need to get a better general-purpose shader into Wilbur to avoid the garish green color scheme that it's been stuck with for the last 15 years.

[redleg7]

You did look at the Fun With Wilbur set of tutorials, correct?....

Rgr I did, and I was able to do a few neat things with it, in fact I think I emailed you about how I was using it. I intend to experiment with it even more, I'm swamped with creating maps at the moment for some upcoming exercises. I like those contour linesin your attachment, is there a way to "round" those mountains so they look more like rolling hills? The neat thing about creating maps my own maps is the ability to create terrain decisions of my choosing. For example putting one hill within small arms range of an objective and another hill that's not. Or creating two bridges where one is in fairly open terrain and the other is easily accessible from a wooded area that provides good cover and concealment. This is one of the biggest reasons we do not use any kind of imagery or real piece of "dirt". In most cases I want to create a terrain problem that has one good answer and one bad answer. For more advanced audiences I may create terrain problems that have many shades of right or wrong depending on the situation.

I think Wilbur has some great potential, I just need to figure it out.

[MitchPjm]

Since I have just been playing with Wilbur, I subsequently found that it has the ability to generate a contour map of a height map/greyscale image. This can then be saved as an image, loaded into your drawing tool as an image and blended onto the map.