The Mountains of Madness

[SikSavant]

At the helpful suggestions of forum members, I'm starting a thread to examine the artful requirements of executing Pasis' mountain style. Here is one of my more "successful" attempts, but far from what I was thinking I would wind up producing.

A couple of the questions that come immediately to mind (re: tutorial), are as follows:

Q) When painting in the High Mountain layer, I am unsure what to do with the brush settings. The last brush size I was using in the mid levels was around 65, so a "smaller" brush could be 30 or 5; just not sure here. Also mentioned is adding some hardness to the bush, but I don't know if I should be looking at 25% or 100%, for example.

Q) When it is stated that it is best to paint on the slope, I am unsure if this means parallel to the ridge line or perpendicular. The ridge line is a slope, but may not be "the" slope referred to.

That's what I can think of for now, thanx for any help

[pasis]

In my opinion the mountain range looks really good already. You can add forest etc and you’ll see that the mountain start to look better and better… And quite often after you have added to other textures you see easier what you want to do with your mountains.

Regarding the questions, you can use several brush sizes with your high mountains layer and anything between 5 and 45 is good. By using different sizes you get the always needed variation. Just remember to have relatively low opacity and flow (about 30-40%) to get a smooth outcome (and it forgives any mistakes you might make).
What comes to the brush hardness it doesn’t make too much difference with small brush actually, but you can experiment with large brush. With hard brush you get steeper mountains with flatter top. As a quick experiment put the opacity and flow to 60%, brush size to 70px and draw one mountain with 0% hardness and another with 100% and you will see what I meant.
I tend to use either 0% or 100% and not that much anything from between, but I encourage using at least two different values as it gives extra nuance to it.

For the second question, the reason for the misunderstanding is my bad English, apologies for that. What I actually meant was that you should paint according to the mountain ridge line which is exactly you have done here.

Hope this helps…

[SikSavant]

Thank you, Pasis, I will give those suggestions a try.

[SikSavant]

Ok. I've done some more "learning", and I'd like to share what I have gleaned from my trial and error. Obviously if you are getting what you expect, you're pretty much set, but I felt I was looking for something that didn't ramp to a point (ridge line) so sharply.

The first thing I did was to give myself a ridge line frame work to paint on as seen in Step1. With the rough outline of my mountain established, I worked according to Pasis' tutorial, but this time, I stroked each ridge line three times in the lower and mid mountain layers. One stroke was right on the ridge line with the other two offset a bit, but still stroked in the same direction (see red arrows in Step2). I intentionally stroke "up" the ridge lines so that brush overlap (if and when it occurs) occurs in the denser portions of the mountain body. The last thing I tried was to use three brush sizes in the hi-mountain layer, but only 50% hardness. At this point I only stroke the ridge line; no offset strokes - needing everything to come to a peak. See Step3 for my final result.

While I am much more pleased with my results, more experimenting is probably needed on my part, but I'm feeling much more confident with this style now. Feel free to comment or question.

[Ascension]

I really like how that blends/slopes into the underlying terrain.