Creating Terrain for 3DGS: by Jeff Frazer                   page: 1 2 3 4 5

Note: Color relates to height in the following manner: Black=lowest / White=highest

Using The Airbrush:
I start working in the center so that I'm not worrying about edges (yet). In the image on the right, I made five passes with the airbrushes starting from a center point. Since we have the fade steps option set the brush does a gradient fade for us (nice). This will make a nice gradual slope on our terrain. The number of passes is up to you. I usually start with four of five.
click to enlarge
Now, using the same process, fill in the spaces between the original lines by making a pass with the airbrush from the center out. The "erosion" of the terrain will, in part, be determined by how jagged our edges are. You don't have to be too picky here so, don't worry too much about trying to duplicate my image to perfection. Just get it close. You may have noticed that the top of our terrain is solid white (all one elevation). This is okay for now but, it won't cut-it in the final terrain. Remember, nature is random. I've never seen a mountain range where all of the peaks were the same height. We'll leave this elevation problem alone for now (you'll see why). click to enlarge
For the sake of time (I do have things to do other that this tutorial =D), I'm just going to use duplicates of my terain_01 layer. You could, and in all reality should, create new terrains. It will add the variety and unpredictability that occurs in nature. If you choose to do it this way, just repeat the steps described above.

In the layer group, right click on the terrain layer and select "duplicate layer". Name the layer terrain_02. Repeat for terrain_03. I modified the layers by rotating and scaling (edit -> transform) to add variety. Then move them into place.

Finishing our height map

click to enlarge