Quote Originally Posted by jbgibson View Post
The rivers. Mmmmmm. Like has been noted, they ought to only join going downstream, or branch going upstream. That would fix a lot of their "something is awry here" impression. Take a look at Redrobes' Most Excellent tutorial about how to get your rivers in the right place - it should be stickied near the top of the tutorial forum. But another thing other than the slight "lying on top of the overall texture" issue, is that you're mapping a continent - your intent to show the width of the rivers varying results in them looking to be what, fifty miles across in places? SOmething a bit bigger than you intend, anyway. It's a tough trick, to show variations in a river - at this scale a satellite photo might show only a pixel or two of width, so it's pretty normal to generalize when symbolizing the watercourses: wide enough to be discernable, but narrow enough to look like a long river. Sinuous looping in the lower reaches of a flatland river has to be exaggerated ... subtly, and probably has to be shown in far fewer number than the real river's convolutions. <shrug> - it's a tradeoff.

The suggestion to incise the river into the terrain by masking the surrounding texture must work - I see it on a lot of Photoshop maps (refer to previous assertion of PS naivite on my part), but even that needs to be done with a light touch - going ahead and beveling the land to further emphasize the channel works best on large-scale (equals small area, remember) maps; the impression on a continental scale starts to be "vast canyon" rather than "river banks".
My incomplete poorly thought out thoughts on rivers was this: start them near the mountains and have them move towards a body of water or the ocean. I wanted the middle of the island/continent to be the highest elevation but not in a volcanic or 'mountain range topped by one mountain at the center of this island' kind of thing. The original outline of the continent was created by the guy running my D&D game and I wanted to go digital with it, so keeping to his original creation I tried to topographically justify what he'd already made. The two major lakes were already created by him and somehow pivotal in what we are doing so I have to keep them. I figured thier creation would be dependant on either a glacier withdrawing in the days of old and leaving behind a deep lake bed with streams/rivers back to the mountains, or a trickle down of water starting at a mountain. Those ranges were set to sort of break up the zones he'd pre-created. So...the challenge at hand is keeping elements that are not topo/geographically sound but must be kept for story sake and still visually justifying everything in the form of a map. That being said, the logic used to create the rivers I feel (very ignorant of other princepals that may improve my logic, mind you) was that the island was high in the middle, the amazonian region was a low lying drainage basin that centered around the expulsion of waters into the ocean by use of a large lake, I was going for something between the basin around the lakes in the Congo and I wanted to illustrate the type of terrain by using a lot of rivers. I think more small 'pools of water' around the area are needed to illustrate the excess of water/swamp. As far as the southerly lake/rivers,what would be the guideline to determine the flow of water to create a river? It's south of a mountain range and the land, in theory, goes from mountainous to plateau and dips into the coast. tldr; what are the rules/algorithms/guidelines for determining (manually) generation of believable rivers?

Quote Originally Posted by jbgibson View Post
Did you create the big and small NW bays and the interior lake by erasing? With a circular brush? They kind of have that character. The outer coastline of the continent looks fine - maybe however you generated that, you could duplicate for the inland water, with some varied jagginesses?
Yeah that lake is pretty starkly round. The coastline was generated using the cloud render as a layer and playing with it that way. I agree that if feels very 'streamlined' as a coast line and I think that comes from me being sort of scared to shy away from the tutorial videos too much. There is another huge group of islands/continents that I have to illustrate for my DM and I think I'm going to play with it a lot more to create a greater sense of jaggedness and randomly dispersed land. I think this map feels to fluid and too contrived to be believable.