a workflow for big exterior scenes

[kyouko]

Hello Cg Archtects,

 

I have collected a great array of information here. I had a problem in some years, and I want to share my experience in the task of try to do something good. It has almost two years that I was doing these things. I fell shamefull because of that because in this time I was not able to develop a really good thing. I was also doing another things during these 2 years, but well...

 

 

First, the objectives:

 

-deal with a great amount of realistic trees

-do a high end 3d illustration, with low poly meshes

(true is that I started doing all this because some professionals in my city said that was impossible to use much trees on a scene, and I am a big fan of GTA IV, and well, if a PS3 can do that things on real-time, a nice render can do great things too)

 

Then, the work:

 

-First thing I did was getting a CAD work and worked days long to fix the lines and layers issues. In MAX (I dont knew CAD was better to the work, and more inportant, that I had the chance to ask the CAD workers in here to do this thing).

 

-Then I did placed the houses and buildings by hand, using copy option. Had the file size issue... then changed to the instance copy option. Had the render time issue... and did all again using vray proxies. They did fine. Was something about 2000 buildings (including houses on this number).

 

-So I started doing the tree work. There was something about 20 000 trees on the scene. Then I discovered that a 2 gig RAM computer was incredible better to render a thing like this.

 

All the streets and stuff was did extruding the fixed lines. The render started to looks ugly and I dont knew exactely what caused this. But was related to the increased number of faces on the scene.

 

 

Well, I finished, barely, this work, beyond the good time to do this, and without the cars roaming the city. End of this work.

 

 

 

Then I started doing another big exterior scene. I was playng GTA IV, looking to the meshes thad builds the streets, pavers and so, and then "well, I can do the city not with lines, but all based on true poly modeling, by hand!".

 

That was insane. There was a imense work to do. I did a good work on this. One good reason to do this is because I had a file of the surface region, with terrain elevation details. So I did this: started from the highest point of the work, and build a small poly-road. Then I extruded the edges of this road to the next 5 metes terrain elevation. And based on this I was refining this.

 

I did this based on this terrain elevation file, but It does not had all the changes the city had in these years. So I did something that I am not sure if was good: modeled everything using google earth pictures.

 

It is strange, because sometimes (most of times), the pics dont fit well with others, leading to much confusion.

 

The objective of this strange hand work is to select the grass later, to detach them and apply a turbosmooth on it.

 

 

 

What do you guys thing about all this? I really thank the patience to read this all. Later I discovered some better methods here, But I ask myself what I did of usefull in all that.