Week Eleven - Landscape

Landscape

In order to create a landscape i wanted to do something i have never done before and a technique of doing landscapes is by using height maps, height maps give 3ds max a way of calculating elevation, from black the lowest part to white the highest part, if i was to create a heightmap in photoshop just by painting one would it work in 3dsmax, well i set out to find out.

I started by opening up photoshop with a 256 x 256 document with greyscale selected.
The next part was the creative bit where i tried to create a plateau with various shades of grey.
In 3ds max i created a plane about 200m x 200m and split it up into 75 segments for height and length the reason for this is i wanted max to give me lots of triangles.
Once the size of the plane was calculated, i added a displace modifier and then selected my plateau heightmap and set it as the bitmap for the displace modifier panel.
then started to play around with the strength and my plateau was born.
I decided to clone the object, i want two different textures to be broken up by each other.
On a plane clone i decided to try out the noise modifier and play around with the settings.
For materials, i have tried to use the default grass, and dirt materials that ship with 3dsmax, so by clicking on the grey globe in the material panel then selecting get material and then searching through the materials until i find one then i double click it to select it, then i play around with the opacity map and select a falloff for it, and further tweaking is required.
I do it again for the dirt material.
Still not happy with what is being produced, i have tried to add the noise plane to the heightmap plane and scaling and moving them around to fit together. I have converted the noise plane to editable poly and then moved its edges to protrude through the other map plane. still it does not match to what is in my head, further tweaking is required.
ok here is what i have finaly made using the techniques above, i have added my outhouse scene to see what the both of them look like, and if any of the members in my group think they can come up with a better landscape i would like to see their attempt.
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