Terrain modeling

[Krisztian Gulyas]

I need to create an animation with forests, mountains etc. There will be some close-ups and a few seconds of aerial view, so it needs to be a really big scene.

 

Is there any plugin/generator for such tasks? How do pros make those beautiful landscapes?

 

This is the first time I need to do something like this, so any help would be greatly appreciated.

 

PS: tried googling it, but I found nothing useful. I'm using Max 2013 + VRay

[Nicolai Bongard]

You could try forest pack or some other scatter plugin that supports proxies to distribute trees, grass and bushes. If you are thinking about the terrain itself it depends on how exact the terrain has to be. If you are free to shape it yourself i would just create a plane with a lot of segments and shape it with whatever method you prefer, so you could get an all quad surface. If you have a dwg or something similar with the contour lines (or whatever it is called - the lines that give height information) you could just import the file and use loft on those lines. You could also check out the Populate: Terrain plugin to get a nice surface with quads. These are the best suggestions i could think of, but then again, i am no pro. =) Good luck!

[Chris MacDonald]

Funnily enough I'm working on a very similar sounding project right now. I have used Forest Pro to scatter the trees & plants, and it's working like a dream. It's rendering at ~3 to ~5 minutes per frame on just this PC. The site is 1.5km by 1.5km, I've used a high resolution google map on a plane as the base, and put a quadify mesh on the plane so that I can push/pull the terrain up and down - the trees are then scattered on this.

 

The inner "detailed" part of the site is done with traditional splines to draw roads, paths, planing areas, etc and again detailed with plants & shrubs using forest pro. Given the small amount of time spent on it, it's looking sweet.