Jamie Holmes - River Power

[JHolmes]

Just a small update from me this week - This is the Hydro turbine with Cage. Took way longer than I thought it would. I will probably re texture once in the scene - the blue may not work with the landscape. I think the two holes on the side are for mounting in some way - I will probably have to come up with something there although you may not see it once in the water.

Poly modelled in 3dsmax and rendered with VRay.

[Russell L. Thomas]

May have to hire you for product illustration jobs........ Very nice!

[Rod]

Sahzaam! The level of detail is great.

[O'Neill]

Very nice indeed!

[Johnus]

Wow. That texturing is amazing...and the depth of field really makes it feel real.

[JHolmes]

I have spent an obscene amount of time on the mountains that will be in the background for my image. I have attached the iterations I went through till I came up with something I am happy with.

This first mountain was based modelled in 3dsmax then added some detail in ZBrush. The snow is a separate mesh that was added by again base modelling in 3dsmax then using the matchmaker brush in Zbrush so that it sat on the landscape. I was pretty happy with this but not entirely convinced because of the lack of detail.


This next option below is basically the same as above but I tried to paint the mesh in ZBrush to get some more convincing snow – This is horrible so I abandoned that idea completely.


This option below is obviously out of Vue. I have used Vue in the past and thought I could probably create some convincing mountains. I was fairly happy with the result but it stops there - I could not export a procedural terrain from Vue to 3dsmax because I was using the PLE Version. Pretty understandable really.


So the next option below I kind of stumbled along when I was trying to find some info about the Vue process. The mountain is generated in a pretty cool piece of software called GeoControl 2. The results are pretty amazing and I could generate excellent diffuse and normal maps. You can also export obj’s and various mesh levels if you don’t want to deal with many polys. This method was a vast improvement on the above. I was pretty happy with this but it still needed tweaking.


So I went back to GeoControl 2 and generated some more terrain and this time around the scale is a lot more correct. The mesh is pretty dense. I think I have about 2million polys of mountain but it doesn’t seem to be affecting the scene too much yet. This is probably as far as I will go with this till I move much further along.

[Rod]

You've a very good result, and this tut may not be of a lot of help, but it's a way to get a lot of detail from displacement maps. again from Ronen Bekerman's blog: Making of 3D render GH House "Norwegian lake shore" by Bertrand Benoit and authored by Bertrand Benoit.

[JHolmes]

Cheers Rod, Thats a good point and a great project by Bertrand.

[threedivisionj]

Nice going so far. Love that dense growth of trees. You've got a pretty convincing scene here. Like to see more.

[JHolmes]

I've moved on quite a bit with the site and surroundings. I just need to get into the house and the turbines. I will do a little bit of work on the trees like add some variation to the different species etc. so it looks more natural. I have used Forest pro for the scattering of the trees, grass and stones. The stones also need some material. The water is displaced using the awesome VRay displacement modifier.

I am trying to keep true to the area I am using as reference so the weather is quite gloomy (seriously most of the time). I quite like this - it kind of adds to the ruggedness of it all.

Its been pretty slow going. I wasn't expecting to be this busy at this time of the year - it usually dies down early December but its actually getting more hectic! It probably doesn't help that I just bought a house too and my things are all over the place.

I will be away for a week over Christmas and then I will do my best to get this finished!!