I've been with CAW for a long time, but just never got to how to make realistic erosion. Do any of you amazing world developers have any tips?

I don't know if I'm really "amazing," but what I recommend you do is look up real life pictures similar to what you wish to make, and use the pictures as inspiration.

I used to use a 3D world program called Bryce. That has a terrain editor which can apply a variety of natural processes to your heightmap, including different types of erosion. Since it uses grayscale files, there's no reason they couldn't be imported into CAW. If you feel like going as far as picking up an extra 3D app, that is Didn't used to be particularly expensive though, dunno about now

there are a number of apps around now that can do various kinds of effects many are either free or have a free version which is typically limited to creating output of smaller sizes, for S3 purposes you couldn't use a larger one anyway. lansderf, Terragen 1 and 2 for eg,

Bryce 7PLE is free, not sure if you can export a heightmap from that? Haven't tried Bryce in years!
http://download.cnet.com/Bryce-Pers...4-75219820.html

I used to love Bryce! I'll have to check into the free version to see about exporting the height maps. From what I remember, it was fairly easy - a lot easier than CAW - to create realistic landforms, although its object placement capabilities (at least in the earlier versions - I was using 3.0!) were limited. If you're just using it for heightmaps, though, that's not a problem!