(RoW July 23 -- 30)
Spring Heights is my second entry for the General Mountain Challenge. I did a little bit of experimenting on creating more realistic mountains with this entry. This scene is based very loosely on a tutorial that someone created. In order to understand what my experimenting was all about, a description is necessary. There are two kinds of terrains in Vue (pulling out my Vue manual): Standard Terrain and Procedural Terrain.
Standard Terrains “use a fixed resolution grid to define the geometry of the terrain.” This means that the closer up you get to these terrains, or the larger you create them, they tend to “exhibit undesirable sharp and polygonal edges. The only solution to get rid of the sharp edges, is to increase the resolution of the terrain. This will however make the processing (rendering) of the terrain slower. It’s also a waste of computer memory, as the terrain has to be increased globally, whereas only a small part of the terrain is actually exhibiting the unwanted artifacts (usually the part that is closest to the camera).”
Procedural Terrains, on the other hand, “are able to adapt their level of detail dynamically, so as to always ensure the same amount of detail in the geometry of the terrains, whatever the viewing conditions. You can zoom in onto procedural terrains indefinitely, you will always see new levels of detail. Luckily, Vue 5 implements advanced rendering techniques which ensure that all this takes place with minimum memory requirements and maximum efficiency.”
Procedural Terrains also can be created globally (meaning that one procedural terrain can fill an entire world). In this scene, Spring Heights contains 1 global procedural terrain. I created my own material for my mountains, a mix between stone and grass. I also played around with Influence of Enviroment. This means that farther you go up on the mountain, there will be less vegetation. This scene was rendered with maximum graphic quality. The video clip at the end of this post is the same scene as Spring Heights, but a different view and animated with a camera fly-through. Although it was rendered in very low resolution, it is here to give you an example of a global procedural terrain.
Interesting! I like the pic, and the video.
Nice, Brady. Very. Now if you can just animate a jet buzzing those mountaintops…
Whoa. Those are awesome! I like the video especially.
Great work, Brady!
By the way, say hi to Liz for me. I think she’s still over at your house.
ok,I think I read it all…..whew
That is really cool!!! I agree with camille, I liked the video the best!
That’s awesome, Brady! Good job on the video, too.
Nice animation it really shows off the benefit of using procedural terrains.
Thanks everybody for your comments! It’s also nice to have another Vuer comment on my blog! Thanks Mark (Impworks)!
Nice to find another Vue user who is blogging. There are more screen scraped Vue press release blogs than real ones (at least in the search engines). I’m just off to favourite you on Techmorati so I’ll catch your posts in future.
[...] and spent a while texturing it. For the waves, I created one procedural terrain (look at Spring Heights) and applied a water texture to it. I set the characters one by one into the water and boat, played [...]