Open the image in photoshop and paint in the basic flat shaded of grey. For example, fill the whole ground plain a darker grey, hills a medium grey, And mountains a light grey or white. Majke sure it is all flatly colored zones with all of the teture and background erased. Then import it into the terrain editor. Give it some shape this time, and use the photo for reference on what to put where. At the end, do a slight erosion to complete the effect, and then lightly paint in slightly darker lines for the rivers.

well caleb db and I will help with stories, renders, and etc.. just let us know what you need

now all i gotta figure out is how to get them forests in there lol...

Soo beautiful. I wanna move there. How long do you think it would take them to find someone who was awol hiding in a place like that??? :P JUST KIDDING!

cool. For the forests, make a tree. Go into the tree editor and make leaf size 1 and, make the leaf number 20. Select mangrow or bamboo from the leaf menu. Make the leaves a nice deep green. Now for the trunk...make distribution close to 100, and low gravity. Go into the trunk material, and make it completely transparent (volume = white, diffuse and ambience =white, transparency set at 100, everything else set to zero.) Then exit the tree lab... Size the tree so that the leaves will cover the right area, and then squish the tree from top to bottom until the leaves are fairly close together. Then sink the tree ino the island until just the leaves poke up.

okie, 1 tree down, 259 to go lol. ;)

no, just use one tree and make it big

no can do, have to make this for distance renders as well as close up renders. If it was just for distance shots that would work fine but its not :/

caleb, Looks like you got the techniques down, but take a close look at the vertical scale. Do you want that much relief? - TJ

on the main island? yes, there are two port sections that are at sea level, there where all the main island traffic will come from, one on the east and west side of the island. The monistary's island (lilsor isle) has a small dock along the shore line on the northern side, with a narrow path leading up the rocky face. The island in the background... well... lets just say it has a 'special' purpose :)

just checking - (vertical scaling is easy to overlook).

oo hey i like how ya got the errosion to work so good along the edges of the island :D is there a secret to that, cause when i was doing it the mountains went all funky on me :/

The secret is to add an inner black hallo all around the island map in photoshop!

okie, i'll give it another shot :)

A comment on the WIP (post 14), rivers look a bit canyon like (dunno if that's intentional or not, but if not...) Perhaps copying the terrain and scaling the hight lower by a tad, and making it out of a water material... Well, this would work provided that the rivers were added to the first terrain after the copy was made... Heh... I dunno if it makes sense, but that's how I look at it. Now the only other thing missing is few wispy clouds here and there for additional scale reference... L8R!