Which didn't quite line up with the reference images which suggest a more subtle fall to the land on both sides indicating that the height of each bank area is a similar height.
To look into this I went back to the original SRTM dataset and noticed something interesting. The terrain was clearly a lot flatter than the original height map seemed to demonstrate. With this knowledge I went back to Angel Island demonstration videos on Crymod and decided that the grey scale spread needed to be reduced. It seems that the original hightmap generated was using an elevation range of purely the cropped areas height range. This meant that it was dealing with a smaller range of heights, yet still mapping approximately 256 colours resulting in a more "detailed" but out of scale height map.
To fix this I regenerated the map but this time using the entire DEM's range which is usually up to around 290 meters. This resulted in a much flatter, but more ultimately more realistic terrain than before.
New Heightmap:
Previous HeightMap:
Result:
The resulting map didn't have to be tweaked an awful lot to add the water relatively accurately. The landscape only needed to be dropped or raised an average of 2m around the site of the water bodies for it to look similar to the reference images.
No more scary cliffs!
