-Made in 2.42 preview 27 from Erwin
-Over 1 million polygons
-Layered node texture for the terrain
-Displacement of the rocks made by displacement map of entire terrain (because displacement ignores stencils)
-Texture painting the stencils in Blender window, high resolution to get better precision
-Trees use alpha planes jumbled together to create nice tree effect (polygon leaves would leave millions in the trees alone)
-Lake base color being white and all color from reflection (because water is colorless)
-Alpha plane above camera with cloud textures for cloud shadow(s).
-Sun is area light to give a nice softshadow effect over the supposedly large area and elevation difference.
-May not render this again (took a little over 40 hours(most of it was in the tree areas))
My newest work, and one of the nicest landscapes I may have ever created.
I said a little over 40 hours, and boy i’m glad this has been completed. Even though the trees are a concoction of billboards except the trunks (for less polygons) they still took a while to render.
I was origionally going to use my old technique of bundling modeled leaves in a ball but then it would’ve been 70,000 polygons (per tree) and that would equal 1 million polys for less then 20 trees and I wanted a lot.
I thought the sky looked a little wierd too, I used a poly object with a clouds texture on it that was part of the object casting cloud shadows.
The ground texture I used 3 materials layered by the node system. All of it except the displacement is procedural adhered to a stencil texture, which I used texture paint mode to see where it would be on the terrain. To get around the limitation of displacement not doing stencils I did, in another file, an high resolution overhead render of the stencil texture with a stenciled on procedural texture and then applied the image to serve as the terrain’s displacement map.
Also, another tidbit, I made the terrain with it’s ledges and detail by first.
-Making two shape keys for the plane, one for minimum height and the other for the maximum height
-Set it to be affected with a vertex group.
-Weight paint it like you would a sculpter
-make the changes you made permanent.
-For this though I took it from that one idea in the Orange blog.
While for the most part of the image the mountains look good, to the far right of the image they look very thin - not quite 2D, but more slabs than mountains. However, this is not true for the rest of the image. On the other hand, it could not be mountains at all, but the rim of a large crater, in which case it makes perfect sense.
The stepped landscape seems rather odd if I follow the crater theory.
Apart from that, a very good work (although I too am not too keen on the sky texture…).
