Did you ever feel like playing God? Just a little? Well....here is a step by step walkthrough on how to at least be able to make landscapes. Of course, this is only for 3D Studio MAX, so maybe you shouldn't order that ticket to Valhalla just yet.....
Making landscapes is an important field in any 3D program. For this tutorial, you will need to use bot MAX and a paint program, (such as Photoshop, Fractal Design Painter etc.). First of all, a heightmap is a painted map that represents a heightfield. The light colours are the highest points, while the darker points are the lower points. Here are a few heightmaps:
The middle one is also used in an image I did of a lighthouse. All of these are made with Photoshop.
So, how do we go about making these heightmaps? In my case, I use Photoshop. This tutorial will deal with making a peak. The first thing you need to do is to use your paint-program to make a heightmap. Use a soft brush for the rough sketch of the landscape. Here is the initial heightmap for my landscape:
Notice that this image is only a scaled version of the actual image. The original size is 500x500. Here you can see the rough outline of my landscape.
It might also be wise to use a blur-function, if your landscape looks too jagged. I use Gaussian blur for this.
Next, you will have to make the appearence of erotion. In Photoshop, there is a smudge-function, that gives me the chance to use various brush-sizes to smudge the image.
Here is the finished heightmap. Notice how the ersion.streaks make it look more real.
Now, it's time to fire up MAX (this is very important). For the landscape, you need to make a box. My box is sized 200x200, and has 50x50 segments in length/width:
Here is the box parametres and also the box in Perspective viewport.
This box is the basis of your landscape. To make a landscape out of it, you need to use the Displace modifier. This modifier is not in the default set of MAX' modifiers, so you will have to add it:
1) The Displace button. 2) If you have not already done so, click this button to add the Displace modifier.
Click this button to see this rollout:
Select the image you have made for your landscape, and set the amount of displace. I use 100 for my landscape here.
You will have to play around with both your paint program and MAX to achieve the landscape you want. Here is my landscape viewed through the Perspective viewport:
Note that this image is merged from both wireframe and shaded viewport.
And that's it. I have not talked about making the map for this, but you will have to deal with that on your own. Happy landscaping!
