Smart Terrain - 3dsmax

[Freespace-3DT]

Hey guys, this is my first tutorial.
I will teach you to do something like this, with no plugins:

http://www.freespacefilms.com/tut_t_00.jpg

It's an intermediate level tutorial and I hope you find it useful.

www.freespacefilms.com/tutorial1.htm

Comments please. :wave:

[X_Dror]

Wow :)
Great tutorial I should try it out tomorrow. (going to sleep now)
Seems to be very useful, and not that hard aswell :)

[Energizer]

awesome tutorial, had fun doing it, very easy to understand!

[Freespace-3DT]

Glad you guys like them.

X_Dror: Good luck tomorrow, and good night now! :)

Energizer: Thanks, good to see I managed to make it easy. It's my first try.

Can you guys show me what you managed to make by following the tutorial? :*poly: :faces: :wave:

[BiG ToE-3DT]

that's good stuff,

[Kage]

Very nice tutorial :D

[Novak]

Hey Freespace,

Really thanks for the great tutorial you wrote. Really Like it. And Finally After looking
several years to make a terrain in 3ds max, I found it, thanks to you.. Know I can make
some environiments in max.. Thanks for sharing your techniques with us..

Oh may I post a link on my site to this tutorial of yours? Thanks in advanced.

Greetz and regards,
Novak

[Freespace-3DT]

Big_Toe: Glad you've found it useful.

Kage: Thanks, man.

Novak: Nice to hear you've found what you looked for. Sure, you can link it anywhere. Spread the word, people need to know how to make smart terrain :haha:

[Durinthiam]

looks good, will read it through fully and follow it in max later but it looks very good :D thanks alot

[Husk]

nice tutorial, and well explained!

[TheCheshireCat]

Wonderful tutorial, you taught me many new things. Thank you! Please do PM me if you make more!

[Freespace-3DT]

Durinthiam: Glad to hear you found it useful.

Husk: Thanks, man, use it well.

TheChesireCat: Thank you, I like to know I can help out. I will let you know when I figure out some new stuff.

[ibrahim_gabr]

Wow Freespace this tutorial rocks very informative and usefull really I learned alot from it thanks , also I gave it a shot in my project and here it is and ofcourse not as good as urs heheheee

http://img301.imageshack.us/img301/6613/2an7.th.jpg (http://img301.imageshack.us/my.php?image=2an7.jpg)

http://img301.imageshack.us/img301/6613/2an7.jpg (http://imageshack.us)

[Freespace-3DT]

Nice work, ibrahim! Thanks for sharing your result with me. You could try to add a sky and some fog, to improve on this. Also, that's why I meddled with the Exponent feature of the Smoke map used for the displacement, so that I get some flat areas aswell as mountains. The flat areas are excellent for deploying mechs or having buildings on them, while mountains do great for blending into the foggy distance.

I would really appreciate to see everyone's results from this tutorial! Thanks for reading and I'm glad if I helped out in anyone's quest for a better landscape. :wave:

[Novak]

Novak: Nice to hear you've found what you looked for. Sure, you can link it anywhere. Spread the word, people need to know how to make smart terrain :haha:

Well Thanks twice then. For the tutorial and the premission the add a link on my site..

P.S. If I got the time, I gonna try it out..

Greetz,
Novak

[Mr. Bluesummers-3DT]

Quick Reply
I'm impressed with how real the results can be. Nice work Freespace!
http://www.mediamax.com/bluesummers/Hosted/test.jpg

[Freespace-3DT]

Novak: Allright, man. I'm looking forward to seeing your result.

Guy-BlueSummers: Wow! That looks brilliant. You made a few changes, could you show me your displacement settings? You've got a lot of little rock-like stuff in there, looks much better. And the lighting, too. What did you use?

[Novak]

@ Freespace: Thanks.. I will try it soon.

@ Guy: Yeh I defently want to know how you did that too.. Nice work.

Greetz,
Novak

[Mr. Bluesummers-3DT]

How that image happened

It looks like I've got about 10 minutes of downtime while at work, so I can belt out an answer before I have to return to the frenzied nightmare that is academic life. ;)

It started off with a terrain I generated using an amazing program called World Machine. I've been using it since it was in Beta, and I've been impressed by it's node-based architecture. This isn't to say that you must have this program in order to build decent landscapes. It's just how I get started.

Next, the landscape texture is built from 3dTotal's Texture CD collection. I used these simply because I didn't feel like processing free images from Mayang for this experiment. The images were layered over each other by tiling ground textures and layering them in Mix maps controlled by dirtmap textures. All very straight forward (images to follow later tonight). I utilized FreeSpace's method on the Mix between rock and grass. Very slick!

The terrain is just a 16x16 plane with a turbosmooth modifier applied (at display: 2 and render: 6). Above that is the displace modifier. Oddly- the terrain texture doesn't use any displacement at all. I feel the pre-load time for that technique is too long.

Finally, the atmosphere is a "Box Atmosphere Gizmo" that has a really light volume fog atmosphere applied to it. It's exactly the same size as the terrain which helps give it that "slice of the world" feel.

Anyway, I'll see if I can get something more visual together for you guys to enjoy later tonight.

Ciao for now!

[Mr. Bluesummers-3DT]

P.S.
The lighting was done by BlueCherry, the mental ray helper plug-in I'm currently working on. It's basically a direct light with support from an HDRI skylight.

[Gofthick]

Without sounding too noobish, how do i create a procedural map >_>

I've never worked much with maps, just the basics, so i'm a little lost here.

[Mr. Bluesummers-3DT]

Explained

http://www.mediamax.com/bluesummers/Hosted/test2.jpg

Well, everything I've said so far was true. This image has some changes though, so maybe I could go into greater detail about them.

I couldn't figure out a way to make the scene easily downloadable, but I did take more screenshots of what I used. I included a "Landscape(lume)" map to add some extra displacement based pseudo-foliage at the bottom of the vally. Also, it's "Bright" color is controlled by an "Ambient/Reflective Occlusion (Base)" map.

Why would I do this? Because I know I want the green to show up at the bottom of the vally (Low, flat areas), which can be chosen using the Landscape(Lume) map. But I also want it to appear in cracks and small crevases in the scene, which can be selected using the Ambient/Reflective Occlusion(Base) map.

Another change was the inclusion of displacement to handle little roughnesses. Other than that, it's the same as I stated above.

You can download the displacement map I used for the terrain here (http://www.mediamax.com/bluesummers/Hosted/output.tif).

Enjoy!

http://www.mediamax.com/bluesummers/Hosted/texture.jpg

[lunarion6]

great tutorial, already used it to =)

[Glottis]

This tutorial sucks!

This is probably one of the worst thing I´ve ever read on the net!!

Blearghn!
*me vomiting the bile of your writings*

Just, do us a favour and stick to posting your works, not how you do them!



I´m kidding man! This owns :D
Probably one of the most user friendly yet effective tuts i´ve seen :)

[Freespace-3DT]

It's great to hear you guys liked it! Even you, Glottis :haha:

Guy BlueSummers, that's a very cool way of approaching terrain. Thanks a lot for sharing.

[Glottis]

Hay, someone had to bring a negative feedback :P :D

Even though they didn´t mean it :P

[Freespace-3DT]

True :D

[deard]

goog job

[michael1zfan]

awesome tutorial...and your work on ur site is fantastic!

i was just wondering, is there a good way to apply this tutorial to make something like this? it is a dirt race track, and this seems like a good way to create the "bumpy realism" on a dirt track

here is a link to my idea

http://img179.imageshack.us/img179/6665/tec3.jpg

on the left the track is smooth (the groove), and on the right is 'rutty' or muddy

anyone know how to acheive that?

[bobi]

Thanks to Freespace tutorial, I have finished one sequence of my new animation.

Take a look at this test render, and tell me what you think:
1MB
http://www.sendspace.com/file/lq3rtw

screenshots:
http://img96.imageshack.us/img96/7646/1ur2.jpg

http://img230.imageshack.us/img230/4295/2nv6.jpg

http://img230.imageshack.us/img230/4475/3tk4.jpg

[Freespace-3DT]

deard: Thank you!

michael1zfan: Thanks for the input. To make something like that track you simply need the appropriate displacement map. Place that smoke map we used for displacement into a Mix map, and for the mix amount slot create a Gradient Ramp slot. This way, with the Gradient Ramp, you can control where to mix in the smoke map ( hence the displacement ) and where it will be smooth ( because of mixing in a black color = zero displacement ). Hope it works. You could also render out a huge image of the smoke map, and then edit it in Photoshop to suit your needs ( simply draw the track displacement as you want it ) and then use that image as the displacement instead of the procedural map.

bobi: Hey man, good to see you used my tutorial. Looking pretty good, especially the motion blur does it justice. However, two little things bother me, the fact that the texture differences between smooth and cliffs aren't very big ( looks like one and the same, so why go to the trouble of messing with Falloff, then ) and secondly, those mountain peaks are way too smooth and rounded up, uniform... some should be sharper, perhaps.

[finalkim93]

great tutorial mate i tried it and did it no problems, an easy tutorial to understand great for me as im a beginner!! :D

[leo313886]

:o nice work
I came from china.
thanks man

[michael1zfan]

thanks freespace, once i give it a try, ill let you know if it works for me!

[michael1zfan]

i tried it, but i think because of the way its mapped, the gradient thing doesnt work....is there a way to have the ground already mapped for a texture, and then to add like a map that covers it differently for the gradient?

im not very good with max and its terminology, so this probably makes no sense haha...

sorry but thanks for any help!

[Freespace-3DT]

finalkim93: Glad it worked for you. Keep working and you'll improve.

leo313886: Thanks to you too for trying it out and good to hear it worked out.

michael1zfan: You might have mistaken the Falloff for the Gradient. They're two different map types. And I don't exactly understand what you mean. Try to use Falloff, not Gradient and redo the tutorial step-by-step, it should work, as there are dozens others who managed it. If you get stuck again, post a screenshot of what's wrong and show it here so we can do this together. :)

[michael1zfan]

Freespace, check you have a pm! Thanks!

[Freespace-3DT]

Gotcha ;P