UV Mapping of the mountains

For the UV Mapping of the mountains, I applied Spherical Mapping, which I then exported to a PSD Network.  The main focus with the texturing of the mountains, was to retain the distinctive looks that mountains and hilly terrain of the Serengeti had; which is largely green but becomes darker and browner towards the top.

I looked for images of mountainous terrain in the African wilderness and I came across this image.

I copied the Mountain terrain over to a PSD network and moved it so there was a balance between the light and dark areas.

In Maya, this texturing initially looked very attractive on the mountain.

However, when I rendered this mountain, the outcome was not satisfactory.

The geometry was bumpy and rigid.  I tried softening the geometry but that made it worse.  We soon decided that this was a modelling fault as opposed to a texturing fault so I requested the Environmental Modeller, Alex to model this new one, which I UV mapped using the same method as before.

This was the rendered outcome.

Incredibly smooth and slender in contrast to the previous rendered model and could perhaps be made more bumpy through a few extrusions of faces or edges; but it certainly works better than the previous attempt and there has been more effort put in to shaping the model, which allows my texturing to stand out better.