Trouble with mountains in Saderan tutorial

[Eckhart]

Hello, I'm currently working on a map using Saderan's tutorial. Everything went smoothly until page 7, where I start adding elevation. I cannot seem to create mountains with such nice 'peaks'. All the mountains I try and make end up being terraced/flat looking. I've experimented with different brushes and opacitys, but I still cannot make it look quite right.


uglymountains.png

This picture shows the problem. I can make it look slightly better by using smaller brushes and lower opacity, but still nowhere near as good as it looks in the tutorial. What am I doing wrong? Does anyone have any advice? Thanks for your time.

[A77ila]

i used that tutorial too and had the same problem, try to click more time random instead ok keep pressed the left mouse, clicking over and over create more random shapes and try change the size of the brush too! and remember that the part you are showing are only the first of 4 steps for mountains (i had the same impression, after adding other colors come better )

[quicksilver]

i found that using small strokes and often just single clicks with small, low opacity brushes worked the best. Also switching back and forth between black and white in the layer mask, so sometimes you are building up and then taking away. For instance, attacking some of those terraces with a black spatter brush with around 15% opacity might rough them up a little more. If you're using a round brush, make sure the hardness is set to zero as well. It's hard to tell but I think that at the stage you're at there, that's just the base elevations. Adding the rest of the steps will help give the mountains more definition and texture. You can also go back into any of the layer masks and adjust them until they look the way you want them too. My only other suggestion would be to play around with the highlight and shadow values in the bevel and emboss layer styles. I darkened up the shadow opacity on most of settings he suggested.

I'm still learning as well but this is the most recent Saderan map I made, if it helps.. I used round brushes initially and then went back over every mask with a spatter brush to rough them up.

Levosi.jpg