alot of people seem curius about what program R_yell used to create that design picture of his map so i googled it. the basic package is free and is 3MB http://www.world-machine.com
Yes that program is very useful, but I'd like to add that the complete working pipeline is this: paint app (like photoshop, the gimp, etc) to make gray scale height maps world machine to test your Height Map and add several effects (erosion mainly) dispgen to convert the resulting HM into Source displacements Anyone interested in Empires mapping should take a look at this method
Does anyone uses the nem's terrain generator ? I just use hammer to make displacements, but it can be a pain in tha ass!
i have downloaded ansd am now having a go... is it one of those things that takes a long time to learn or is quite simple?
World Machine is excellent - I bought it when it first came out 5 years ago. It's great for getting good looking erosion and such, and there are some good macros out there for things like roads (where you feed it a black+white image of the road and it will conform it to the terrain and ensure it's horizontally flat).