Terrain 01

The Terrain

 

 

Created the mesh using Maya ocean. Then converted it to polygons to get those natural shape. I sculpted it further to give more height  and flatten area where needed. Then I simply duplicate and resize them to give different mountains in the background. UV map is just a simple y-axis planar projection and have the texture painted in Mudbox. The problem is when rendered the quality is low. This is due to the fact that no image is big enough can be obtained to paint the whole terrain. The tiling effect is obvious when the scene is view from far. Repeated textures make the terrains look cg. I did a research online and found a good software (Vue) and able to export the terrain and paint the texture there. I then did a render of the terrain after the texture is painted from the top view and managed to save the image at a high resolution (4098x4098) and map it to the terrain in Maya. 

 

The above image doesn't has the texture tiling effect as the 4k texture map is good enough to cover the whole mountain. I further give more details to the mountains by extracting a normal map using Crazy Bump. The settings there are important to fine tune the outcome (like setting the finer and large details to the appropriate values).

Did a test render with just one directional light and using raytrace shadow. The bump is a bit high but can be reduced in Maya settings by lowering the value in the bump attribute. The background will of HDRI based image (sky and clouds) to lit up the scene a little more.