dam render

[Da_elf]

hehe. yup. a render of a dam. a very very small dam mind you, we are not a large country






was a rush job. most of the time was on doing the landscape since the contours were unusable (moron land survayers)

[armilla]

Looks great Elf. The landscaping works very well. How did you model it and what sort of reference did you have without the contours?

The water is very nice as well.

[cecil gittens]

Great work as usall Da_elf, love the texturing on the road. Where is this dam located?

Cecil G

[Da_elf]

st thomas.
as for the landscape i poly modeled it. i got the contours. but they were super super messy and unusable

[pshupe68]

nice renders - like the BOXX truck - very cool.

What kind of render times did you have? Just stills or animation? Thanks

Great job.

Regards Peter.

[Da_elf]

was about an hour or so render time.

[cecil gittens]

Da_elf, you said you you poly model the countours, does the methord have an advantage over the terrain object?

Cecil G

[Da_elf]

it does when the contours supplied are broken in many places. when i tried a terrain on it it just disappeared. no idea why. and it would have taken too much time to go in and find the problem and fix their contours.

[ShaunDon]

Often times even when I get decent contours, the terrain object creates so many long and thin faces that it has to be subdivided/relaxed to death in order for it to smooth properly. There's gotta be a better way of doing it... is there a routine anywhere to take a subdivided plane and stamp the vertexes down to the Z-height of another object, i.e. a terrain object?

Shaun

[cgrant3d]

...is there a routine anywhere to take a subdivided plane and stamp the vertexes down to the Z-height of another object, i.e. a terrain object?

Shaun

Actually I've been using SimuTerra lately which does exactly that (http://www.compuneering.com/simuterra.php)

Check out this screenshot (http://www.scriptspot.com/ftp/vray/TopoLines.png)where I have the topo lines on the left, the terrain object in the middle and a quad mesh from SimuTerra on the right. It's got a slightly annoying interface but being able to have quad based meshes is just so useful to me that its worth figuring out another little app.

They have a 30 day demo available, though it's only a hundred bucks for the base app anyways...

[jacksc02]

its come a long way since i saw it last da elf!

Looking good. Grass is a bit tiled on the overhead shot

[ShaunDon]

Booya, thanks Chris!

[DaForce]

Well done Elf Good to have it finally finished... thos contour lines sounded like hell.

The top shot looks neat, I like it.
Other than the slightly odd looking road textures up close, its all well done.

[dbuchhofer]

Looks fun Elf, sitework = hellish

interesting find chris.. playing with the demo a bit here, and it looks useful for the 'filter polys' for simplifying the topo lines if nothing else the road creation looks a little too painful to be useful to me though probably.

before this i'd done a couple different things to get a 'quad' mesh out of a nasty set of topo lines, one way was to simcloth a drape over it, (scale it down first though!) another was to take a z-depth render of it and use that as a displace map in the max default displacement

[percydaman]

hey i recognize my tree. im gonna have to start charging royalties... you'll be hearing from my lawyer...

actually im kidding...i have no lawyer...and if you can read this, your too close to your monitor...