Mountain Forests - How?

[jibbajibba]

New mapper trying to do regional maps but stumbling on Forested Hills/ Mountains.

In this map I wanted to forest the Hills but couldn't do mountain and forest as they just over lay.

Any ideas?

[lostatsea]

What software did you use ? Do you have a bigger version you can post?

[jibbajibba]

What software did you use ? Do you have a bigger version you can post?

Sure this is a larger map not sure how it helps solve the issue

All done in photoshop

[Midgardsormr]

It depends on how exactly you arrived at where you are. I can see that you've got some shaded relief of some kind on the mountains. I think probably what you'll want to do is to find a way to apply that relief to the trees as well, so that the shape of the land underneath the forest is apparent. For best results, you may want to turn down the bevel effect that's creating the trees texture, or perhaps just change the highlight color to be a light green instead of white. That should also have the effect of making them look less like plastic.

I like to sculpt my land shapes by placing a layer filled with 50% gray at the top of the stack, set the blend mode to Overlay, then use the dodge and burn tools at a low strength to paint in light and shadow.

If you're using the Lighting Effects filter for your shaded relief, you could apply it to the forests by rasterizing the layer first to bake in the layer effects. I'd advise you make a copy of the layer first and hide it, just in case you decide you want to go back and make a change.

Another possibility would be to make a copy of your mountains layer, desaturate it, place it above the forests and either clip it or mask it so that it affects only the trees. Then adjust the blend modes and opacity to see if you can get the relief to transfer to the forests. That would just take some experimentation, but I'd guess that either Darken or Multiply would be the blend mode of choice. Possibly Overlay.

Something else you will want to consider is whether you can "tatter" the edges of the forests a bit to represent the trees thinning out at the tree line, assuming these mountains are tall enough for that to be an issue.