Yes that's a lot nicer looking, for sure. Hopefully the technique doesn't take too much extra rendering time for the full one.
The snow portion didn't add too much time. The real time hog is when I crank the extra blending and ultra sub-pixel smoothing up. The last full render (at 12 by 12) took a little over 5 hours to complete. I imagine that when I go for the full sized version of the map, I'll be looking at roughly 15 to 20 hours, unless I stick with simple fast sub-pixel smoothing.

You've brought it along quite far from the image I initially commented on, the transitions from one mountain to the other are much better now.
Like I mentioned before, the transitions were there as far as elevation went, it was a matter of getting them to show through on the basis of coloring.

looking pretty nice.. first I saw just snowy holes in the ground.. had to stare it for a while to see the snowy mountaintops.
That's probably due to the lighting source. I've got the sun set for a mid afternoon render from a slightly southern point. We've had this discussion about a couple of other maps and, or so it seems to me, most maps that include shading are "rendered" with the sun to the east rather than the west and, again so it seems, from a more northerly point. In any event, lighting sources from unusual angles do that to me regularly as well. Add to that the fact that, sometimes, I'm half-blind, and you can imagine how badly it messes me up.

GW