The Western Kingdoms - by Greason Wolfe

[Caenwyr]

I would say, you've put so much work in the mountains that it would be a pity to downsize them now. They're awesome at full scale!

[Diamond]

Yep, I'm with Caenwyr - leave your mountains at normal size and up-size the base map!

[Greason Wolfe]

So, I've enlarged the base map as much as I can while still keeping it at a workable size, and I think I've got the mountain blending process very close to where I want it to be. I still feel as though scaling might be a bit of a problem however. The map is meant to detail an area that is 545 miles east to west, and 325 miles north to south. To me, the mountains still feel a little off in terms of size, but that could just be me. The image below has a bar slapped in that represents a 15 mile span as a way to visualize the general size of the mountains. Am I just being too picky, or are these mountains of a reasonable size? I can go a little bigger, or a little smaller with them by, maybe, 25%. Anything beyond that, and the brushes start going a bit wonky on me.

GW

[Diamond]

Well, how wide is your typical real-world mountain? These look to be about 5 miles wide, which seems reasonable to me.

[Greason Wolfe]

Thanks, Diamond, that helped, but, you know, sometimes I'm an idiot. It dawned on me (an "aha!" moment, the lightbulb came on, whatever you wanna call it) why the scaling seemed off to me.

I kept trying to look at these as individual mountains/peaks rather than looking at the whole as a range of mountains. When I shifted that perspective, they quit looking as if they were "off" in some way. Now that I've made that shift, I should be able to start making some serious progress in terms of laying these out and moving on to other important features.

GW

[Greason Wolfe]

Woohoo! I have an actual update this time. Laid out a smaller coastal range. Fairly happy with the way they look at this point, although I have to keep reminding myself not to look at them as individual peaks. The only thing still bugging me about these is the blending. On the full sized image (too big to actually post here) the blending looks okay, but at this smaller size, it doesn't seem quite as smooth. Still, I can live with it. Going to try to continue working in the smaller, lower profile ranges as the evening goes on, and hope to get to the larger ranges in the next day or two.

GW

[Diamond]

I think it works; it seems nice and seamless, to me, anyway. Are you planning to add forests also? Curious to see how you'll manage that...

[Greason Wolfe]

Alas, it has been a pretty long week. Spent yesterday recovering from about 70 hours at work through the week, and finally got a chance to start experimenting with the forests today. I'm fairly happy with the results, but am still debating whether or not to try to add in some tree trunks in place of the outline, or maybe in addition to the outline. I'm almost certain that no matter what I do, I'll have to rework the outline as it seems a little thick to me, but, again, that could just be my perception.

GW

[Ilanthar]

Hum, I don't know how you did the forest, but it looks too digital to me. I like the idea behind it (and I think it would be better without the trunks), but it should have more shadows/darkness in it to match the mountains and a more "drawn" style.

[JefBT]

I am very curious to see this map done.