Mycanum Bay Region

[su_liam]

I like the mountains on this one. I really like the passes through the mountains, except... Well, the passes are kind of flat. The quality of this map is so great that it has inspired me to look into how to improve those passes.

As you noted multiple passes with the Difference Clouds filter over a Clouds filter makes excellent looking mountains. Kind of like a cross between billowy and ridged perlin. Nice. Unfortunately, they aren't very controllable. The photoshop Clouds filter has a particular frequency and roughness(not much). Which is bad, because what I want is another layer of relief below the mountains, basically a longitudinal hump with a bit of, still fairly low frequency, variation. I think I might want a gently rolling structure to that variation giving rise to foothills below the mountains. Once I have that I'll add it together with the mountain heightmap(using Linear Light mode in PS, I think Gimp just says, "Add"). Before adding them together, the two layers should be scaled using levels so that the sum doesn't exceed 255(at least not by much).

I'm stoked.

[RobA]

I'm trying to figure out how get convincing "snow" on the tallest mountain peaks right now... I might combine all my heightmaps together and apply some isometric tinting and then tweak that a bit.

Try a palette map on the heightfield grayscale. Just define a palette that corresponds to the elevation you want (hypsometric tinting?)

I think I might want a gently rolling structure to that variation giving rise to foothills below the mountains. Once I have that I'll add it together with the mountain heightmap(using Linear Light mode in PS, I think Gimp just says, "Add"). Before adding them together, the two layers should be scaled using levels so that the sum doesn't exceed 255(at least not by much).

I showed how to do this here using GIMP.

-Rob A>

[GlennZilla]

The problems with the clouds filter in photoshop is one I've been dealing with. But I find that by combining additional filters in other layers blended together you can get some very specific results.

I think the part of my method that I like the most is that I can manually paint one of the layers to adjust things with a great deal of certainty.

For these mountains in particular a barley opaque layer with a large blob of white on a layer with the blending mode of Overlay, or Screen will have the effect Si Lam is looking for.