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Big Trouble in Little Guilin

Guilin: best viewed from a turbocharged airboat.
With a chain cannon.

It is very easy to break realism. All you have to do is give the eye something it does not expect. A tree trunk out of place, a missed reflection, a rock wall that's patterned instead of random, and the illusion is gone.
A wholly fantastic scene is much easier to create.
There are tricks to hide your carelessness: fog, distance, dark, but on the whole, achieving realism pits you against the law of diminishing returns as it demands more testing and tweaking.
That said, forgiveness for breaking realism can be earned by a map being fun.

No striders were harmed in the making of this map.

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