Badlands part one

There are several programs out there purely designed to create natural effects. While a lot of them do yield good results, they are often quite procedural and don’t offer much artistic control, with additional elements such as debris, or manual control over weathering and ‘hero’ sculpted terrain pieces.

In the first of a two-part tutorial (continued next month), we will create a basic terrain model, using procedural modelling and automated mesh refinement, before collapsing down the mesh and manually painting in our own refinements, using 3ds Max’s own deformation painting toolkit within Editable Poly.

To add extra detail and refinement, we will also procedurally refine the mesh depending on the detail that we deform; natively this isn’t applied but, with a combination of modifiers added to the stack, we can use this feature to ensure that mesh refinement is only assigned to areas that require it, therefore cutting down rendering times.

Keeping rendering times to a minimum will be particularly important in the next tutorial, where we will set up additional detail in the scene, such as fallen debris, using Reactor simulations to distribute realistic fallen rocks and particle systems for procedurally placing smaller rocks over the surface of the environment. These use painted and procedural maps as distribution. All this will happen before texturing, lighting and setting up any volumetric effects to simulate environment depth.

It has to be said that this tutorial is quite polygon-heavy, hence using the mesh refinement techniques noted above. If you are using a machine with limited amounts of memory, you may want to amend or reduce the number of Meshsmooth modifiers in the Modifier stack to prevent any instabilities. However, bear in mind that after the procedural modelling stage is complete, we will be collapsing the mesh down before mesh deformation painting. Additionally, the mesh deformation painting on the detailed mesh can be quite slow to update, depending on your graphics card and driver: we would recommend using DirectX (preferably) or software drivers, as OpenGL does not perform well in this instance.

Click here to download the support files (37.6MB)