Fading tricky endless terrain in the distance for ANIMATION without falloff

[Morne]

Hi all

Besides the typical stuff like falloff etc, how would you go about creating an "endless terrain" that fades in the horizon? I mean if I had a flat plane of 10km X 10km with an aircraft flying over it, soon I would get to the end of the plane and then the falloff trick won't work anymore to make the terrain to seem to fade in the distance to the horizon. Using ONLY Max, VRay, combustion/nuke, how can I add geometry or trick, fake, beg, steal or borrow to always have MORE terrain the closer my aircraft (camera) gets to it? I'm thinking in terms of a long animation of flight.

I'm thinking there must be a way to do it somehow for a pre-rendered animation since in a flight sim they somehow do it realtime so you can fly forever (or untill fuel runs out)

Any hints tips and oppinions would be greatly appreciated.

[Spikeadeliv]

'rolling' horizon

How about a 'rolling' horizon and landscape as they used to do in oldish films coupled with a photographers 'infinity' type effect, eg bg would never end, could be caught out with repitition though.

laters

spike

[Morne]

How about a 'rolling' horizon and landscape as they used to do in oldish films coupled with a photographers 'infinity' type effect, eg bg would never end, could be caught out with repitition though.

laters

spike

I have no idead what you talking about with either of those...

[Bathyscaph]

Make big terrain tiles. Put a bunch of terrain or terrain elements into groups then animate these so that they leave their current position as the plane flies past them and reappear in the distance. It's just like a big treadmill. If you make the terrain sections organic enough, put them out far enough so they don't pop into view, and rotate them so that you are always seeing them from a different angle then you could make this idea work for you.

Another idea is to use a tool like World Machine to generate displacement map data of a huge landscape and then use that to build your world.

[ShaunDon]

How close to the surface of the terrain are you planning to get with this animation? My instinct would be to do it with texture maps and displacement, but you've probably already considered that...

[mike_kennedy]

Vray plane with the right tiled texture???

[mike_kennedy]

Vue or Terragen and other such software support this as well I believe....

[Morne]

Vray plane with the right tiled texture???

but you can't uvmap a Vray plane is my issue

[beestee]

Spike is onto a pretty good idea. Create your environment as a cylinder or sphere that can be constantly turning underneath your subject. How large that object would need to be depends largely upon your camera location, moves, and length of the clip.

[flino2004]

cilindrical and some backplates with panorama images or treelines work pretty well