largescale top-down map

[Falcon]

I find myself in need of making a few large-scale (about 200-500 km across) top-down maps of what should be realistic landscapes of small continents or large islands. I will need both a large map of it all and zoomed-in maps up to a resolution of about 1 pixel = 10m

I'd like to use TG2 since I'm most familiar with it and have the necessary export workflows (will also need the heightmaps for a 3D realtime view, etc.) down.

However, I find little regarding large-scale terrains on the forums. There seems to be a gap between local scenes and planetary scales. Maybe someone has something or remembers something I missed and can help out?

Troubles I encountered so far:

Coastlines - mine are always too steep or too uniform. I can't get proper beaches and I can't get it done that one side of the island has beaches while another has cliffs. It's always one or the other.

Terrain variations - an island that size doesn't have the same grass everywhere. It has swamps, forests, grassland, but also plains maybe even a small desert (it's for a game, so the variations should be a bit stronger than on Earth).

Rivers - not the Make River node, remember my scale - something that draws meandering lines roughly from the mountains towards the coast or lakes would be enough.


For none of these have I found solutions in the forum. Any hints?

[RArcher]

While I am sure it is not impossible, I do think that procedurally creating something like this would be very difficult.  If I was to make an attempt, I would most likely try to create a painted heightfield map, and then create masks based on that.  It may be worthwhile for you to look into World Machine or Geocontrol for creation of the terrain that you want.  Then bring that into TG2 and refine it from there.

[Volker Harun]

I would recommend GeoControl ... a nice application for creating terrains including rivers and such. I have not checked World Machine for a few years anymore, to be fair.
I am not sure about the ability to tile terrains so you can cover a larger area ... So what you can do is using Cyphyr's planet generator (here in the forum) which seems to be very nice for the larger areas and you place special heightfields to your areas of interest.
As far a s I remember Geocontrol you can make a large terrain ... and you can make a more detailed region out of this using a crop ... I guess that should work.

Regards, Volker

[Falcon]

Thanks. Indeed, it seems that GeoControl 2 does the landscape nicely, and I'm making good progress with a shader system in TG2 to provide nice ground cover.