Reply With QuoteI'm far from an expert but to me the mountains, while looking like mountains probably should in this style of map, are a bit too straight and look more like a surgery scar, particularly when zoomed out.
Possible mountain issue
Hey everyone,
I have a map that I have been working on for months (I don't have the speed some of you do) and I've hit a bit of a snag. The snag being my mountains. I've tried different styles over the past two weeks, always resulting in me deleting the layers and starting over. Now I have found some tutorials that seem to fit my map style well, and the mountains look pretty decent. But something just looks off to me. See image below:
Mountains Example.png
I'm happy with the rock texture, and with the brush I used which isn't perfectly round. It looks random enough but something just looks like it's wrong, but I can't put my finger on it. Am I making some giant mountain-making mistake here, or could it just be because there's no trees and rivers yet?
The reason I'm asking this is that this map is rather large, and before I spend hours filling the map with this stuff, I'd prefer to correct any mistakes now. Thanks in advance for any comments.
I'm far from an expert but to me the mountains, while looking like mountains probably should in this style of map, are a bit too straight and look more like a surgery scar, particularly when zoomed out.
Without knowing the map scale, it's hard to say what might be off (is this map 1000 miles across or only 100?) As damonjynx points out, however, the mountains do seem a little straight. They also seem a bit symmetrical on each side of the spine: real mountain ranges tend to present one side more strongly than the other.
A nice set of mountains to show asymmetry can be found in California ( https://www.google.com/maps/@36.1314.../data=!3m1!1e3 ). That's a fairly close-up look that's only a hundred miles or so across (zooming out will show some of the non-straight appearance). And scale is important, because some mountain ranges are quite straight at certain scales. An example of a mountain chain that's almost perfectly straight for a few hundred miles can be seen at https://www.google.com/maps/@-10.124.../data=!3m1!1e3 (note how it looks very different as you soom in, though). One thing that these mountains have in common is the presence of many angles that are around 120 degrees (plus or minus 15). The Ural mountains are a nice example of a mountain range that looks straight at continental scale, but is very obviously not-straight at medium scale.
Both good points, thanks for the feedback. Here is a cutout of another mountain range, this time a little thicker and less sharp so it looks less like a surgery scar (completely agree with that analogy, by the way).
Mountains Example 2.png
As for scale, see the image below. It is downscaled a bit in the interest of filesize, plus the full scale still shows a lot of details that are quite simply ugly. Red arrow on the left points to my first image, red arrow on the right points to the image above. The cutouts are at 100% resolution so that's as much detail as I'm gonna get in there.
Map Downscaled.png
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