A new mini-tut on sat-style mountains

[Redrobes]

Its a great tut & good technique and color but I dont think the mountain texture looks like mountains. I was wondering what it would look like if you grabbed the texture for mountains from some real ones like in Pakistan or another big range. A USGS heightmap or shaded relief or something.

[waldronate]

Its a great tut & good technique and color but I dont think the mountain texture looks like mountains. I was wondering what it would look like if you grabbed the texture for mountains from some real ones like in Pakistan or another big range. A USGS heightmap or shaded relief or something.

The issue is that mountain ranges tend to have a texture that's related to their direction. It's because most mountains are folded or uplifted in such a way that cracks form along the length of the block. This technique uses an isotropic noise and modulating it by the mountain chain locations doesn't affect that. Using overlays from real mountains would have a similar issue, perhaps worse unless they were carefully chosen and manipulated for direction and scale. (Note that some familiar mountain blocks such as the Sierra Nevada in California and the Himalayas along the India front are more uplifted block of uniform rock than and show a fairly simple dendritic pattern etched on the block. Most of the really long chains do show the type of features I'm talking about, however.)

For an artistic interpretation of continental-scale mountains (that is, for a map) this is an excellent process. For a geologically-oriented one it's not quite there. I would not expect it to be geologically accurate as that is not its purpose.