Playing with mountains

[jfrazierjr]

I'm still not quite sure how you do those long snaking range ridgelines. They do bear somewhat of a resemblance to what they actually look like from sat-photos (although I also think sat photos of mountains look peculiar, but you capture that in a good way!)

Not quite sure what you mean by "long snaking ridgelines". I just follow RobA's video tutorial process (though I have started using white and gray instead of B/W in my gradient) and just make the mountains with plenty of twists, turns and shape variation. So far, I have been using the mouse most of the time for test stuff like this, so I could probably get a bit better results if I were to use my tablet instead. Once I have the mountain shape down, I start playing with various brushes for dodge/burn, then smudge, spread, and G. blur and then usually smudge again for the Gray/White layer used as the bump map. Takes a bit of time, but really helps sell the randomness on the "slopes" and also makes the ridges less uniform and unnatural looking by "flattening" them in a few places.

Joe