dbox for Google's North Bayshore HQ

[lukx]

holy moly! awesome !

[alias_marks]

great work Neil. Would love to understand a bit more about how you used Dem maps with forest pro if you care to elaborate.

Saw this a lot of places and had me fooled it was a backplate photo + foreground CG.

[Jason Stewart]

As someone who has lived about 15 minutes away from there my whole life I will say that you guys did a hell of a job recreating the area. It is instantly recognizable. Really great work!

[Nicinus]

Also very familiar with the area and agree, just incredible.

[Neilg]

great work Neil. Would love to understand a bit more about how you used Dem maps with forest pro if you care to elaborate.

http://www.west-racing.com/mf/?page_id=2979
it grabs pretty crappy models, but good enough for distance. we just flattened the foreground completely. The textures it grabbed were kind of crappy so we spent 3 full days painting out cars, people, shadows, cleaning trees in roads, etc. the before/after of the ground texture is kind of nuts.
We're doing a writeup for itoo software at the moment (slow going in between other things) but we basically automated as much of the process as possible - used photoshops color selection to make a black and white mask, got the wacoms out to clean it up, turned that selection into a path and exported that as a .ai to bring into max and scale over the surface.

The buildings were modeled in a similar way - black and white mask, turned to .ai. made a couple scripts to do the roof models and did 3 seperate groups (house, office, industrial - 6-8 textures each) of facade textures which were multitex'd over the whole thing. roof uv maps were inherited from the ground plane. Using this method we got about 90% of the surrounding area & landscape (all 150km back) done by 3 people in 2 1/2 days.

Thanks jason & Nicinus! none of us have actually been there but we spent a lot of time looking at photos and street view researching before we started. glad to know the prep paid off

[alias_marks]

Awesome, had run across the Terrain Generator when it made a splash a while back, but had completely forgotten about it. Seems like the perfect illustration for it.

Thanks for taking the time to write up some description. Insightful stuff. Look forward to seeing the others if/when they are released.

[Dariusz Makowski (Dadal)]

Awesome, had run across the Terrain Generator when it made a splash a while back, but had completely forgotten about it. Seems like the perfect illustration for it.

Thanks for taking the time to write up some description. Insightful stuff. Look forward to seeing the others if/when they are released.

Yeah it looks good that plugin but I gotta say the developer is terrible. Just stay away from it .