Dreaming city environment composition questions

voidfusion

I was watching this map in Dreaming city. How can I apprach making this map ?

Do I create whole mountain and surroundings and then paint it or do I create smaller rocks and carefully place them in the map?

How are these big maps created ?

This map has cave through the mountain. Do I place rocks so that has a cave hole or is there some other better way to do it?

BagelHero

Mm, don't have the time to shoot ideas on how this might've been done in detail but the artists DID post quite a lot to Artstation, which might give you some idea! fwiw though you had a closer idea with carefully placing smaller rocks and props around to create the larger formations. Combine that with some detail textures, the base terrain, world-space based texture blending for moss or water or what have you, decals, etc etc, and it comes together...!

These gorgeous sculpts, textures and assembly from Kevin Whitmeyer
https://www.artstation.com/artwork/rbREa
https://www.artstation.com/artwork/kAEA6
https://www.artstation.com/artwork/W42aQ

Wonderful world-artistry from Kyoungche Kim
https://www.artstation.com/artwork/3RQAo
https://www.artstation.com/artwork/2PQNK


The beautiful lighting work from  Madison Parker, who seems to have the area in your shot;
https://www.artstation.com/artwork/3RlXJ


Hope this sheds a little bit of light or gives you some ideas on where to look. I believe theres also some breakdowns of work with a similar scale in Vertex Mag but I can't quite recall.

voidfusion

Thank you. So it is composited using smaller rocks into a bigger mountain ?

But I wonder how are they making caves through the mountain,