An Exercise In Contemporary Rural Design

Pushing The Technology

In this scene there are literally almost a billion polygons. A shot like this would have been hard to do even several years ago. But thankfully technology has come very far. It makes me wonder what we will be able to do even within the next few coming years. Just to give you a sense of proportion let me give you some what of an idea why and how this scene is a bit complex.

To begin with, the project was landscape was modeled in a program called World Machine. That program produces several items. The first is something called a height map

Courtesy Of Wikipedia

Hitting New Highs

The height map is a black and white image as you can see. This picture is brought into 3DS Max and projected through the surface of a plane and displaces the 100,000 faces on that plane upward. This gives the general framework from which the landscape is built. World Machine also puts out several other files that are used to create the landscape. These come out looking a lot like the picture above. They are black and white and represent various aspects like where the flow from the erosive flow has been and something that indicates a specific range in the slopes. These pictures allow me to further displace the terrain and help to dictate where the trees and other plants will go.

To add the plants to the scene is a big challenge. The model is built to scale so the mountains that you see in the background are very natural looking because the scale matches that of the building. Just to give you some perspective on how many trees there might be consider that the original plane that I turned into terrain is about 10 km. In all there are nearly a million plants that could be in this scene. With each plant made of a high number of polygons, on the order of 10,000 each, there are millions of polygons from just the plants alone. The other factor is that placing a million of anything by hand would be impractical.

Get Your Hands Out Of Your Plants

To get all of the plants where I needed them too something called procedural modeling. This basically involve using one of those mask pictured before to define the slope angle for the trees. Where it is more steep there are less trees. This procedural process also creates the materials for the landscape. It distributes the rock and grass materials and creates more detail in the picture.

All of this takes about 24 gigabytes of ram to effectively render. The image that you see at the top of the page took about 3 hours to render on a pretty beefy I7 processor.

Support The Arts & The Artists

I want to thank all of the people out there who have followed me and upvoted. This type of computer art takes weeks to do. So if you have not reposted an article in a while would you please consider making the one. I also love feedback. So tell me what you think of this project. What would you change what would you keep the same?