When do terrain features become beyond belief?

[markem]

Specifically - mountains.

CC3 has some really tall mountain icons and I was wondering if there is some kind of proportional concept that makes things look unbelievable. I'm sure someone has asked this before but there are some things I've seen in the world that looked unbelievable but were actually real. (I once saw a tree that I just went - no way. It had branches that made the tree almost 100ft in diameter [area under the branches].) It was up north. I think I was in North Carolina at the time. If I were to put such a thing on a map - I'm sure at least one person would go "That's not realistic".

So when do you think things get too weird to be realistic?

[waldronate]

It's as a matter of familiarity more than anything else. If all that you're familiar with is http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Fi...y-bald-fp1.jpg , then http://travelinsuranceplus.com.au/wp...scape_3115.jpg will be unbelievable. If you've never seen a huge banyan tree, then you probably won't believe that there's a whole village living under its branches. If you have a cavern lit by the faint blue glow of predatory worms on the ceiling, that's just too fantastic as well, right ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waitomo_Glowworm_Caves )? Or waves that light up as they break on the beach? A river 10 miles wide?

And so many more weird and wonderful things...

[markem]

I don't find the mountains unbelievable - just different. Radically different - but just different. I think the limestone mountains in New Zealand is also a radically different way to have mountains (they are a maze). I think the rock formations found in the deserts in the western part of the US (where some rocks are very delicately balanced) is more towards the unbelievable. Especially some of the very-very thin bases with a large rock on top. It is like "How the heck did that happen?"

But what I'm thinking of are things like Mount Everest that is only about 1,000ft around but five miles high. That's where the credibility of that happening comes in to question. Or a tree like in the movie Avatar where it is miles high. Wouldn't that be impossible? The tree was huge but I don't think, in the billions of years the earth has been here, that any tree has ever grown to that size.

As an example of extremely large and almost unbelievable creatures - the Smithsonian had on display a snake. The snake wound its way through five rooms and the height of the body (bottom to top/back) was about five feet in height. The head was so large it could have swallowed a person whole. If I hadn't see it myself - I never would have believed such a thing could have existed.

Or - when I was growing up, my mom kept buying these "Book of Knowledge" books. In one of them was the world's largest Portuguese Man-of-War ever found. The above water part was the size of a destroyer. The tendrils of the thing went down so far into the water that they didn't know how long they were. Caught in the tendrils were sharks (including a great white shark) and other large fish. The US Navy found it and after examining and measuring it they used it for target practice until they had completely destroyed it. It was deemed to be a major threat to mankind and fish in general. To me, this really represents "unbelievable". Even though it was in the book.

"Often mistaken for a jellyfish, the Portuguese man-of-war is actually made up of a colony of organisms working together. Its tentacles can extend 165 feet (50 meters) below the surface, although 30 feet (10 meters) is more the average." Located at Photo Gallery: Colossal Sea Creatures

[Deadshade]

So when do you think things get too weird to be realistic?

For me it is when the probability to observe them is (much) lower than 0.1%.
This is a serious question and it is important to realize that the answer may only be a probability.
Generally what we call realistic is what is observed with a fairly high probability and irrealistic what will rarely be observed because the probability is very low.

A unicorn, an uphill flowing river or a mountain made of gold would be judged irrealistic but not because they are impossible.
A horse having a rhino gene which governs the horn creation on the front could probably give a unicorn but the probability is negligibly small.
The gold atoms may be enough to make a mountain but the probability that they gather all at the same place is negligibly small.
And while a water molecule is not forbidden to move uphill, the probability that all of them constituting a river do so at the same time is negligibly small too.

So if you put on your map too many features with each a negligibly small probability of existence, it would be called irrealistic.

[Redrobes]

Im with Waldronate on this one. There are so many photos I have seen in my time where you need to re-expand your bounds of what is possible for natural processes to create. My corollary to this tho is that it must be bounded by physics. Whilst I have seen Deer with a single central horn that looks a lot like a unicorn...
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/n...ience-animals/
http://blogs.discovery.com/animal_ne...l-sort-of.html

In fact I recall a photo of a bloke with one....
http://www.odditycentral.com/pics/th...-on-earth.html

it is still true that water doesn't flow uphill. Thats a physics issue. Change your physics and you can have it but its unbelievable on earth.

Theres a land somewhere with a lake in it and in that lake is an island and in that island is a lake with an island in it. Oh didn't think id be able to find it but here it is...
http://www.viralnova.com/vulcan-point/
Stuff like this makes you step back and just say ok we will just let that one slide right there.

Also, this is a fantasy mapping site as well as realistic. Its up to you to set the bounds of a fantasy map.

[Azélor]

Indeed, it is incredible what the water, heat, wind and erosion in general can do.

A result of the freezing cycle: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pingo
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patterned_ground

[Midgardsormr]

Reality can get away with a lot because it doesn't have to justify its own plausibility.

[markem]

Reality can get away with a lot because it doesn't have to justify its own plausibility.

That is SOOOOoooooo true.

Have you ever been someplace where a hurricane has gone through? I actually had to drive to a friend's house in a major hurricane. You see some really strange things. Like the skirting from a trailer wrapped all the way up a power pole. Or a McDonald's stuck on an island. (The ditches around it had filled with water and overflowed leaving the building out in the middle of a lake.) Or rings of electricity running down the outside of a power line where a tree limb kept smashing in to the transformer on another power pole. Yeah, hurricanes are weird. :-)

Way back in the late 1960s a major hurricane struck the Mississippi coast. We went on vacation the week after the hurricane and when we went through Biloxi Mississipii we saw the devastation. The roads were open but the sea wall had been pushed back fifty feet from where it used to be. Houses were just wiped off their foundations but the church that was right next to the ocean - one small broken window. All of the stain glass windows were ok and the angel on top of the building (hands cupped up towards heaven) wasn't even touched. A block away - a cruise ship which had been converted to a restaurant had been picked up and set next to the new location of the road.

But to go back on track - so even really tall or really wide natural objects (like a tree or mountain) can be used and they actually might look normal.

[Deadshade]

Reality can get away with a lot because it doesn't have to justify its own plausibility.

Oh that is deeply wrong
The operationnal word is probability, not plausibility, and the Nature is strictly justifying it everywhere and all the time.
Every single event that we can observe in the Universe is governed by quantum mechanics and quantum mechanics fixes extremely accurately the probability of all of them.
So low probability events will be observed rarely and high probability events often. And the Nature was kind enough to justify to us why and how she was deciding which is which.

So people are not really free to define just on whim or personnal subjective experience what event is probable and what isn't.

Luckily the display of pixels on our screens belongs to the high probabilty events so that we can discuss reality on Internet

[markem]

You know Deadshade - I wish those quantum mechanics would come out and fix my truck. I keep calling them but they say they have to be in two places at once and my truck would be a third ordinace which is outside of their field of concern. 8-P

And don't even get me started about that one guy who keeps playing around with string. He says he has some kind of a theory about why its important. :-}

To be on topic though - I think it is important to at least make something somewhat resemble what it is you are drawing. After all - you don't want people having to come and ask you "What is it?" A good example is the painting "A cow in a snow storm" which really is just a white washed canvas. Without the title you wouldn't get the joke or know why a white washed canvas was hanging in a museum and cost as much as it did. :-)

Salvador Dali made a point of making things not look like regular objects to see how far he could stretch normalcy. The thing is - even with the deformities the items still looked like what they were. To my mind, they still fell within the "realistic" area or actually "believable" range. Pablo Picasso though made some paintings that, IMHO, fall outside of the "believable" range. Like the "Cow in a Snow Storm" painting - it isn't until you are told what it is supposed to be that you actually CAN see the image.

So a vine is a vine - unless it looks like a flower. It is a flower then or still a vine? When a mountain looks like a skyscraper - does it become a skyscraper? Or is it still a mountain? Or a tree that looks more like a rocket - is it still a tree? Or will everyone go "Why is that rocket in the middle of the forest?" This is what I am wondering.