Environment: 3d mountains

[mage111]

i like the colors and the rolling hills in the forground, but the background mountains seem a little, flat on the top, and of 1 height kind of

also: the hills seem like they could go on forever, but the mountains seem very isolated, i dont know if its size that creates this illusion or the way you've created your scene. but creating larger mountains in the back, maybe even less that stack infront and behind on another would give a better look to the scene

just my thoughts,

good work though
:-)

[i-d]

Thanks for comments.
I'll try to add more depth to those mountains and
some more atmosferic color shift.
I was going for general composition and lighting,
like on some Breugel paintings.

[eMysfit]

Looks pretty cool. I was just wondering how the clouds were done? Are they just a picture rendered behind the mountains, models themselves, particles????

Id have to agree with mage111 on the mountains all looking one hieght and flat though. I love the desolate color scheme though.

Id like to see a tutorial on how you did it all actually! Ive been wanting to get into making some cool landscapes like this but I don't really know where to start. I also want to be able to make clouds that can move...and still look good, if possible.

[i-d]

OK. Clouds are maya fluids, composited afterwards
because mental ray is not rendering them.
Integrated in maya 4.5 and up, fluids are wonderfull
tool to have but to use at its best you need moderate
size farm with chickens, pigs and 32 horses, no I meant
processors. Here is to illustate this:

http://www.i-d.hr/3d/CloudsAnim.jpg

This nice picture in HD res took 8hrs on dual xeon machine,
ok I used raytace shadows with light fog, but I like to push the limits even when its not making sense.
This clouds are easily animatible. If you have the horsepower ;)

For ground I used height field, also a novelty in maya 4.5.
It lets you preview displacement in real time. Good.
Not so good when you start stacking textures like I did. No more preview, ha. Preview plane is also not editable.

Back to normal nurbs plane with mapped displacement.
I used ocean shader for basic gound,
just plugged ocean shader to objects displacement attribute,
not the whole shader. Basic shader is combinaton of snow
texture and luminance node controled by height.
Layered shader was not used because mray doesnt like these.
It works, but slows down rendering considerably.
I used ocean for displacement because theres no procedural texture that could give you that nice rolling hills effects.
Sharp at the top and smooth on bottom.

Mountains are made with noise tex connected to displacement.
You have various mountain creators here - perlin, billow, I
used wave, this one is also great for desert creation.
Displacemet textures are controled with circular ramp on amplitude to lower the mountains near the edge of planes.

Everything else is experimenting and waiting.
Mental ray makes divine displacements like renderman
but is memory hog and crashes frequently with such large
poly counts at render time (more than half a milion for this particular scene).
It could be optimised even more by converting
displacement to high res maps and chunk everything in pieces.
Displacement to poly has its problems too, resolution of poly cannot be too high but you have something you can edit.
Thats a next step to improve those mountains in the back and
give a picture more depth, living in ones I like.

Igor

[Zmaster]

wow,can you post a wireframe

[eMysfit]

Does anybody know if this Maya Fluids ability is copied somehow in max 4? It looks pretty cool and Id like to fiddle with it, but I don't have Maya...although the more I see what Maya can do Ive been thinking of switching to it, but then again I just tell myself, it probably isn't the program, I probably just suck and it would be pointless to spend so much money(or time finding it free/trial) because It wouldn't make me any better....anyway if anybody knows a way to do clouds like those or mimic the maya fluids in Max that would really help me out!!!!

[Soterialive]

http://aliaswavefront.com/freemaya -- if you are interested but I am not sure if it contains the fluid effects. You have to read up on that. As for the lanscape, I particularly like the same size flat tops, it gives it a very eerie, strange feeling to the scene , and it makes me wonder what happened that caused those unnatural peaks (or lack thereof). Composition very good btw, it draws me to the area just in front of the same peak mountain range. Awesome stuff. When I get to landscapes can I hit you up on some tips?

[LowEndFrequency]

I dig the concept and the render, but those mountains are too sharp and jagged, they look like bryce mountains (eck!). I'd tone down that displacement map.

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