Moving mountains

Not so long ago, complex 3D landscapes were most often accomplished via matte painting or camera projection. But recent significant advances in rendering technology, coupled with ever more powerful hardware, have allowed for another method – creating fully detailed landscapes on a vast scale. Large-scale 3D environments do not replace existing methods but rather combine with them to add flexibility. One example of this is the ability to have completely free camera movement within a very complex terrain or to make quick lighting changes in a finished matte painting.

There are a handful of programs designed to deal with the scene sizes we are speaking of. The best known include Terragen 2, Massive and Softimage XSI, while those coming up fast include ZBrush. In this tutorial we will look at Vue 6 Infinite, a benchmark program for creating complex environments without having to wade through masses of configuration options.

Vue 6 Infinite is a powerful terrain creation and rendering program, capable of handling scenes containing tens of billions of polygons, thousands of objects and complex global illumination and radiosity routines, without reducing your computer to a pile of slow-moving mush. Vue contains expandible tree and vegetation libraries and has an impressive import function for objects from other programs, complete with micro-polygon displacement, texture mapping and, in some cases, full animation. Vue can also import animated Poser figures to populate your scenes.

With its fast displacement engine, Vue is well placed to collaborate with programs like ZBrush and Mudbox. There’s also a special edition called xStream, developed for seamless integration with most other 3D programs.

In this tutorial we will work through the creation of a basic scene, touching on some of the new features in this version. For an alternative workflow, we have included a section on how to utilise satellite data in Vue to create landforms.

Click here to download the support files (66.3MB)