Quote Originally Posted by Redrobes View Post
The detail of the mountains look real because it came from real height map relief from earth data such as Shuttle SRTM or similar.
And that's the major weakness of collaging for terrains: terrains are defined by their drainages rather than their landforms. That is to say that landforms emerge from drainage patterns controlled by underlying geology and the landforms are joined by those drainages. If you don't get your rivers lined up plausibly in the collage, then the results are pretty unconvincing for anything other than very quick glances.
Montcalm's map looks very nice at first glance and individual subunits are all plausible. It's an excellent example of how careful selection and manual blending can overcome a lot of the problems that often turn up when people do this sort of collage. However, I personally find the landforms a little bit unsettling because the individual parts just don't seem to flow well from one to another. For example, there are a number of glaciated mountain forms and then there's that big block on the right that isn't nearly as worn. I also wonder if maybe there was a different scale used for some of the results? The top-left mountains just feel out of scale with the rest of the map (but my eyesight has been going in the last few years, so it might be me). I also wonder if the auto-exposure feature of the Tangram Heightmaps browser might be contributing a little bit because auto-exposure will tend to make things appear more rugged than they otherwise might.