Deep in the woods

With a range of versatile features, WorldBuilder is a powerful standalone application that enables you to create and render detailed outdoor environments featuring all kinds of vegetation. It has multiple object libraries that help you build scenes quickly, and is compatible with most major 3D applications, such as 3ds Max, Maya, LightWave 3D and Softimage XSI. You can composite scenes together with any of these applications during render time, sharing lighting, shadows and cameras.

In this tutorial, we’ll be using WorldBuilder Pro 3.6 to create the wooded landscape above. The software comes with extensive help files, and we advise you to work through these before beginning work. If you get stuck at any point in the walkthrough, refer to the settings shown in the full-size screenshots and final scene file.

First, we’ll create the base terrains using the skeleton lines that define the areas and elevation of the land, then we’ll texture them. Once we have an initial environment that we’re happy with, we’ll start to place the different layers of vegetation. We’ll use card trees (flat planes) for the background elements, as they don’t have to be detailed, and a normal camera movement won’t reveal that they’re not 3D. Plus, they render extremely fast!

For the foreground areas, we’ll create clusters of L-Systems (true 3D) trees and generate unique variations using the Random Seed control, before altering their orientation and textures. Finally, we’ll place different types of objects, such as stones and grass, using area scattering. We’ll use only one direct light source in the scene, although you can get fantastic results using several sources to simulate light bouncing or to highlight particular areas.

To finish off the scene, we’ll arrange some close-up trees and manually place them in exactly the way we want. Then we’ll align them to the terrain, and the scene will be ready to render. Some postprocessing of the final render in an image-editing program such as Photoshop will give us a look much like the image above.

Please note that the full version of WorldBuilder is not included in the download. You can find a demo version of WorldBuilder 4.2 here.

Click here to download the support files (~8MB)