Khayra world and everything in it

A test render of their money. I still need to figure out the engravings on one and play with the lighting a little more. Anyway. Gold is considered the least valuable of their coins. (A single key is about the size of your index finger.)

 

The idea formed after I came across some really cool ancient chinese currency that looked like blunt knives. Wiki has a page on them. (Knife money - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia) I though the currency really fit the exotic kind of feel my world has. So I decided to mix it with what I knew about currency.

Their coins are similar to weights, one would use on a scale. That way when a tezre would go to buy something, they could measure what they wanted with the number of " gold keys" it weighed. Eventually this kind of went out of fashion and they standardized a value for a "steel Key" being equal to 50 lbs of grains. Anything less is between 1-20 "gold key's."

The crystal in the middle is used to show the one receiving the key that its not a counterfeit. As its clear and allows one to see the layers that make up the key. The crystal is blue (Tezre blood is blue) on "gold keys"(GK) indicating that its the coin of the people. If you are a lower paid person living on this world. You will be dealing with GK on a daily basis, and will maybe once a month have a Steel key in your hands and would would only ever dream of seeing a Fossil key.

But yeah that's pretty much all my reasoning, and explaining and stuff. yeah.

 

I used photoshop, created a bunch of repeating textures for the dunes,water and grass. Some could even be considered marshes. for the mountains I took one of Photoshop's preset brushes and applied a bevel/emboss to the layer style.
here's some screenshots so you can see how great this stuff is for quick mountains.




The water is just two layers of rendered clouds and a blue gradient. its pretty easy to do.