This was a project where I needed to generate a random, but realistic old-world style map. I was looking for a somewhat procedural way to generate islands that had topographical features that were consistent with the geometry. So water and lakes would appear where slopes were steepest and where it would naturally pool in the geometry. This could have been custom built in 3D, but I was looking for a faster way to do this since iteration on the islands, their positions, etc. was very likely. I found an online, map generation application from Stanford University that would randomly create an island based upon a seed number. It also had unique features like topographical height maps & water features. The results were okay, but not to the quality level I was looking for. So my method was to use the map generation software, then take the height map information into World Machine, and generate a simple render from it, then take the result into Photoshop and Painter to make it look more old-world and hand drawn/painted for the map.

1. Map generator: http://www-cs-students.stanford.edu/~amitp/game-programming/polygon-map-generation/demo.html From this app, I would randomize until I got an island I liked, then saved off the 2D Slope & Elevation data.

2. In Photoshop, I did editing to clean up and isolate the rivers & lakes from the base image, then fix the elevation data.
3. In World Machine, I created a simple terrain generator that output the results to a raster image.

4. Back in Photoshop I did some composite work to get it prepped for some image filtering.
5. I dumped the image into Corel Painter, and used some custom settings with the watercolor effect to repaint the image as a watercolor.
6. Back to Photoshop and a bit more compositing then some heavy effects settings to the image to outline it, put in some effects that made it blend into the base paper map I had created.