When do terrain features become beyond belief?

[Midgardsormr]

Reality can get away with a lot because it doesn't have to justify its own plausibility.

[markem]

Reality can get away with a lot because it doesn't have to justify its own plausibility.

That is SOOOOoooooo true.

Have you ever been someplace where a hurricane has gone through? I actually had to drive to a friend's house in a major hurricane. You see some really strange things. Like the skirting from a trailer wrapped all the way up a power pole. Or a McDonald's stuck on an island. (The ditches around it had filled with water and overflowed leaving the building out in the middle of a lake.) Or rings of electricity running down the outside of a power line where a tree limb kept smashing in to the transformer on another power pole. Yeah, hurricanes are weird. :-)

Way back in the late 1960s a major hurricane struck the Mississippi coast. We went on vacation the week after the hurricane and when we went through Biloxi Mississipii we saw the devastation. The roads were open but the sea wall had been pushed back fifty feet from where it used to be. Houses were just wiped off their foundations but the church that was right next to the ocean - one small broken window. All of the stain glass windows were ok and the angel on top of the building (hands cupped up towards heaven) wasn't even touched. A block away - a cruise ship which had been converted to a restaurant had been picked up and set next to the new location of the road.

But to go back on track - so even really tall or really wide natural objects (like a tree or mountain) can be used and they actually might look normal.

[Deadshade]

Reality can get away with a lot because it doesn't have to justify its own plausibility.

Oh that is deeply wrong
The operationnal word is probability, not plausibility, and the Nature is strictly justifying it everywhere and all the time.
Every single event that we can observe in the Universe is governed by quantum mechanics and quantum mechanics fixes extremely accurately the probability of all of them.
So low probability events will be observed rarely and high probability events often. And the Nature was kind enough to justify to us why and how she was deciding which is which.

So people are not really free to define just on whim or personnal subjective experience what event is probable and what isn't.

Luckily the display of pixels on our screens belongs to the high probabilty events so that we can discuss reality on Internet

[markem]

You know Deadshade - I wish those quantum mechanics would come out and fix my truck. I keep calling them but they say they have to be in two places at once and my truck would be a third ordinace which is outside of their field of concern. 8-P

And don't even get me started about that one guy who keeps playing around with string. He says he has some kind of a theory about why its important. :-}

To be on topic though - I think it is important to at least make something somewhat resemble what it is you are drawing. After all - you don't want people having to come and ask you "What is it?" A good example is the painting "A cow in a snow storm" which really is just a white washed canvas. Without the title you wouldn't get the joke or know why a white washed canvas was hanging in a museum and cost as much as it did. :-)

Salvador Dali made a point of making things not look like regular objects to see how far he could stretch normalcy. The thing is - even with the deformities the items still looked like what they were. To my mind, they still fell within the "realistic" area or actually "believable" range. Pablo Picasso though made some paintings that, IMHO, fall outside of the "believable" range. Like the "Cow in a Snow Storm" painting - it isn't until you are told what it is supposed to be that you actually CAN see the image.

So a vine is a vine - unless it looks like a flower. It is a flower then or still a vine? When a mountain looks like a skyscraper - does it become a skyscraper? Or is it still a mountain? Or a tree that looks more like a rocket - is it still a tree? Or will everyone go "Why is that rocket in the middle of the forest?" This is what I am wondering.