How to get good large scale landscapes in MAX?

V-Ray V-Ray Common Off-topic
1

Anyone have any ideas on how to create a realistic Ground material for a large power plant scene based in Kentucky? I am having real trouble trying to create a good texture for my roads and grassy areas because my textures tile . I suspect its because the scene covers such a large area of land but still I know it can be done. I need areas that are weedy and other areas that are kind of sparse. I tried using a noise map but that didn’t really help the tileing. I will try to post a pic tomorrow…but I thought I might pick some brains on this hard situation. I have not seen any good ground excet in VUE 5 or 6 Infinite that was realistic enough for me. I just don’t know how to get my vray camera out to match in VUE. Then I could use a Matte and just use VUE to do the Landscape. I haven’t given up on Max 9 yet though…I know it can be done but I don’t know how! HELP!!
Thanks fellas!

Dave

2

hmm well, one way to do it is exporting your uvwmap (high res) then in photoshop paint the texture… ??

but as you are i’m having trouble to get a nice terrain going on…

one way to get a nice ground is using terragen for creating the mesh, but the materials also remains a problem to me.

sooo..

3

if your textures are tiling, you can use the offset filter in Photoshop to make your textures tileable. There’s a tutorial by Neil Blevins on this:

http://www.neilblevins.com/cg\_education/photoshop\_tips/photoshop\_tips.htm

It’s also a good idea to use more than one image and mix them using a noise map. In fact you can do this with 4 or 5 textures stacked up and the tiling will be all but invisible.

You can also get away with fewer repetitions on textures which are a long way off. One idea is to create 2 textures - one for the foreground and one for the background and mix them using a falloff map set to “Distance Blend”.

There’s no substitiute for high quality textures, though :wink:

4

Soooo, for example i would like to get a map similar to the ones in terragen (grass > snow)

I would mix a couple of grass maps and a couple of snow maps.
then using a falloff (perpendicular) combine those to get the grass on the low grounds and the snow on the heigh grounds… ??
hmm i should test this out.

if i have soem time i’ll get to it.

5

terragens uses a really nice procedural editor. one that im sure could be coded here. however it can easily be done using falloff maps and other stuff. However ive never seen anyone do one in max as good as terragens yet.

6

I would personally recommend rendering out a hi-res plan ortho view and paint it in photoshop then remap it to the geometry.

If you use unwrap & texporter the resoltion is not high enough IMO.

7

Why would you not be able to do that now? All you need is a gradient ramp and you’re set. Take a close look at the available options in the seemingly simple gradient ramp. One mapping channel controls height distribution, another maps the textures from the top etc. and then through in a falloff set to distance blend, and set to object to make more local changes if you so wish.