Playing around in the shader editor today, and made a fantasy style mountain landscape with displacement. I couldn’t come up with a decent way to fake erosion, so I decided to try importing it into Gaea and back into Blender. I hadn’t tried this before, and it worked out pretty well.
Here’s a shot with the heightmap from blender:
Here’s the same shot with the heightmap after erosion in Gaea (no additional modifications to the shader). I don’t have the paid version, so this is limited to 1k resolution:
1k is fine for background mountains, but anything in the mid or foreground needs way more resolution.
So here I simply averaged the two heightmaps, which worked better than I figured it would. I suspect there are better ways to combine them, and I’ll be exploring that! I’ll also mess with the material shader.
Lastly, an areal view (a top-down orthographic camera):
I followed this up on a WIP thread
And the Finished Project