WIP - Forgotten Lands

[AslanC]

That is a very very very cool looking image. I am most impressed

[Ashenvale]

Holy crap, Pasis!

Jaw-dropping.

Hold on. I have to go back and look at it again.

I may be a while.

[Ashenvale]

Crappola. Now I have to figure out how to give rep.

Thanks a lot. I was cruisin' along just blistfully in my ignorance.

I read through the thread. It's mostly gibberish to me. I make a living with a paintbrush and can find my way around Photoshop when need arises. But I haven't the faintest clue what all the rest of these programs do. Please bear that in mind while I try to offer something useful.

Other than

WOW.

From an artist's standpoint, I have some suggestions. The blue pool snags and holds the eye (which is your primary goal, so kudoos!!). But it seems out of character with the rest of the image's color scheme. Specifically, it's the only cool color, and its richly saturated with blue. It seems like the color lake one would expect to find in a temporate climate under brilliant blue skies. It feels somewhat out of place in this brooding mountain setting.

I don't have meaningful advice to correct this. I want the pool to remain the center of interest, but I don't want it to look cut out and pasted on. Perhaps try desaturating it a smidge, or shadowing it so that it feels more deeply folded into the surrounding mountain-scape.

My eye goes immediately to the lake, which I take as a victory. (If your real aim was to draw the viewer's attention to the forested valley below, we have to talk. Kidding. I know it's not. You're too gifted.) My eye then goes to, and lingers on, the mountains illuminated by the sunlight at the top of the image. To my mind, that's a problem.

My advice, for what it's worth, would be to avoid putting your highest value area (the section flooded with the most light) away from your center of interest. In painting, the rule is reserve your highest area of contrast, and your area of most saturated color, for your center of interest. (Please forgive my pedantic voice. I know you know this. I'm speaking to anyone who might not.) You have engaging contrast and color intensity (saturation) in the mountainous area around the pool. I just think you may have given the top secion of mountains too much empahsis by pushing the values there very high.

I'd prefer this image, from an artistic standpoint, if the highest value and richest contrast were in close proximity to (what I asssume is) your center of interest -- the lake.

Sorry. Too many words to say something simple. Three glasses of wine and 3:30 in the morning my time.

I'm still overawed by the gripping power of your vision. Blood and thunder, man.

Blood and thunder.

[Ashenvale]

Okay, figured out this "adding rep" thing. I wrote something like, "the mountainscape in Forgotten Lands makes me want to crawl in a corner and cry."

I'm off to my corner now.

[torstan]

Excellent work Pasis. You've really set the bar high with this one!

Great work.

[pasis]

Ashenvale, you are right about the importance of the lake in the mountains. I will surely tweak it later and my intention is...well you will see later. The sunlight in the north mountains will be handled manually later and I already have a way to do it. I'm glad to hear that you see it in the way I intended it to be seen. I'm not an artist and I'm not always sure if I'm doing things right and it's good to hear I'm on right track.

Although majority of the mountains and hills are due to the grayscale height map, I can make great enhancement with the methods introduced in my tutorial. Here is a small sample I'm working on now where rivers run through a valley. The left one is with the height map and textures put on top of it and in the right one I have added hills and cliffs etc manually in just one minute (or maybe it took two minutes).

[pasis]

I wont be able to work on this today, so I though I could send what I have now. I played with light sources in Photoshop to highlight certain things to learn for the future versions. Hope you like it.

[Gandwarf]

I certainly like it. You need some waterfalls and rapids now

[pasis]

Waterfall...hmmm...Never really done them before as they are so difficult to make. But I'll give it a try right away.

[waldronate]

Nicely done. The base textures give it that warm feeling of old limestone.

Two minor niggles: there are a fair number of overly straight parallel stream channels (nothing you can do about that; they are a common artifact of CG fluvial models) and the streams that descend to the river on the right wiggle rather more than I would expect. Water follows the path of steepest descent and the meanders in the stream are a bit out of place. It's what I would expect for a footpath (people don't always follow the path of steepest descent willingly) or a large river on an almost flat plain (where the river has to dissipate flow energy by going side-to-side and making meanders).