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  • nature bg creation

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    Creating CG nature

    In this tutorial I'm going to show you how to make terrain, trees and grass using Maya.

    Start with poly plane. Use default settings, scale the plane.

    Then go to sculpt geometry tool.

    Deform the plane to get the form of terrain.

    Smooth the plane. I did it twice (level 2 smoothing).

    Add detail to the mesh.

    Then go to UV selection mode.

    Grab all UV's and go to UV texture editor. Then apply Relax to UV's once.

    Now UV's match the mesh better.

    Assign lambert material to the surface. Then go to 3D paint tool. Click assign/edit texture. Make 1024 texture map.

    Use flood paint button to paint whole surface in white.

    Then add black parts, on places where the mountain tops will be.

    Then assign another lambert shader to the surface and paint areas where the grass will be.

    Then select the two lambert materials you've created, graph their networks in hypershade.

    Delete shaders and shading groups

    Create another lambert shader and plug layered texture into its color.

    Make three colors in the layered texture (just click near that green rectangle and new one will show). Change their colors to grass color, dirt color, and rock color (later we will assign texture to them).

    Create reverse node, and connect one texture to it.

    Then create luminance node, and connect reverse node to it. I did this because the mountain tops need to be white instead of black. Luminance is used to convert RGB data into Alpha (grayscale) data.

    Then MMB luminance node to connect it with rock alpha.

    Change blending mode to over

    Then connect second texture with alpha of second color (ground color)

    Set blending mode also to over on both layers. Third could stay to none since there's nothing underneath it.



    This whole layering thing could be done in many different ways, so feel free to explore…

    If you render at this point, your result will look something like this:

    Connect textures to layer colors.

    Also, you might need to increase Repeat U and V, to get more texture space.

    Create Directional light, set the color, and set intensity to something like 1.3 to 1.5



    Here I also set shadow maps, just for quicker rendering.

    If you plan to render using software renderer or you just don't want to use final gathering or global illumination, then create low intensity directional lights to get sky light. Set color according to sky color. These lights shouldn't have shadows.

    Also, I connected layered texture to bump of the ground shader. Use very low values for bump here. Here is 0.2, but I think in the end I had it set to 0.05 or something small like that.

    Now comes the hardcore part. Create one 3D fluid container. I don't want to explain fluids now, or else this tutorial will be very long. Just hold presets button in the attribute editor while fluid is selected and find Clouds.

    Also you can change falloff method to something like sphere (it's in the shading tab).

    Create another fluid container and set preset to skyFog.

    In incandescence tab change ramp colors to get the mood that you are looking for.

    So when rendered, it starts to take shape.

    From this point on, I used mental ray for rendering since it renders fluids very fast.



    Change shadow type on light to raytraced.

    Now, trees. Open the Visor window, scroll down to trees mesh, and select the type of tree you want to use.

    In paint effects tool settings (the icon shall pop up in toolbox. Just double click to get options), change display quality to something like 20 or so. Also you can turn off draw as mesh to get speedier feedback/response.

    In template brush settings (In paint effects menu), change scale to match the scale of your scene.

    Here I used OakForest brush to make trees which will be in the distance.

    Go to modify/convert to polygons and set the numbers really high.

    Now the speed in the viewport will drop. Assign trees to layers, so you can hide it.

    Then change tree type in the Visor. These trees will be real 3D, so prepare yourself…

    Select ground, and make it paintable (in paint effects menu, make paintable), draw a few trees onto the mesh.

    Convert them to polygons.

    Don't bother drawing new ones. Just duplicate existing trees as instances. This will save render time a lot.

    So after some duplicating… also set interactive shading to get more speed.

    Now in Hypershade you can see that there's a lot of duplicate shaders. You can delete all duplicates and reassign them to geometry, or you can select them all and use the attribute spread sheet.

    Go to all tab, and find reflectivity and set it to 0. If you don't do this all trees will behave like reflective surfaces, and render time will be huge…

    This is rendered in MR.

    To get more speed in viewport, assign the trees to layer and right click on layer to get options. Go to layer attributes, and change level of detail to Bounding Box.

    Now fur. Go to the rendering menu. (you might need to load fur plugin). Select surface and go to attach fur description/new

    Wow, huge white grass will pop up. So?

    Change global scale to 0.1 or something like that. Also set density to a high number (my processor cries everytime I do this).

    Scroll down to baldness attribute and right click to get pop up menu. Create New file texture. This file will be the same file you painted as grass alpha map.

    Now baldness will be yellow.

    Change Resolution and bake baldness map. This will bake the fur in viewport.

    Change colors to grass colors. You can also load grass preset using presets button.

    You can also assign texture to tip color to get some color variations.

    Then bake tip color, as you did with baldness.

    That's it. Enjoy.