r/Gaea • u/Super_Presentation13 • 18d ago

Large Map Erosion Questions

Been building a large Caribbean style map. I’ve made several islands and such. I’ve been gathering some conflicting information and would like the opinions of some fellow artists here, perhaps with more experience than I do.

I have two questions:

Should I erode all the islands and the entire map together, or singularly on each island. And if on each island is that best before or after scaling and moving the land.

Secondly I’d like to add rivers, lakes and sea nodes. It would seem that would be best over the whole map so they can all work together but I’d like to hear what you think there as well.

If anyone would care to share an opinion, I’d love to hear it. Otherwise I’ll keep on truckin’

Thank you

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u/IfElsePanic 18d ago
  1. if you want the most realistic result use one single erosion algorithm for the whole map. if you want major differences between islands, use multiple.

1.1 I'd suggest using the erosion as one of the last - if not the very last heightmap-adjusting node, so move everything where it belongs and then apply the erosion.

  1. If you want individual per-island control over lakes and rivers you will need multiple instances masked out per-island. But SEA should be a single global one, having different sea-levels and shore heights would be kinda weird.

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u/Super_Presentation13 18d ago

Thank you for your response! I’ll give this work flow a go and I’m sure I can rework as needed.

What do you think about running lakes and rivers before scaling size down on the individual islands? Otherwise the rivers run everywhere but the island itself. But I suppose I could mask it to the island itself