The latest project is a nice waterfall scene. The scene is going to be a still shot so i don’t need to worry about animating the water coming down the waterfall. But, I might want to make this in the future, so if anyone has any tips on achieving that, please post a comment and let me know some tips. Always seeking good 3D tips.
A good tip before starting any 3D image is to determine the size of the render you are making. I am making this scene for a website where it might sit in a Flash header. You’ll see in the image below I have really just started out. I created 2 mountains and dropped a basic texture with an ecosystem on it. I’m not really too concerned with the textures at the moment, that will come later. Right now, I am focusing on the shape and size of the mountains. The mountain in the foreground I made in the terrain editor and cut out an area where I want to put the waterfall. This mountain is 1024×1024. The background mountain is further away so it doesn’t need as much detail so i made it in the terrain editor at 512×512. Its basically a prop. I didn’t spend anytime on it all creating its shape. I just opened the material editor, click the mountain button a few times, click erode, and clicked canyon. And TADA, that background mountain is done as far as the shape goes.
Now that I have the basic shapes created, its time to tweak the environment, textures, and add some plants. I modified the environment by bumping up the light intensity because in this scene its really sunny, like midday kind of sun on a clear day. I also modified the texture on the foreground plant by adding an ecosystem. One complaint I have about the plants in Vue 5 Infiniite is there really arent enough of them. There is only 1 bush too. How are you supposed to make a tropic forest with 1 bush? And unfortunately, it wasnt even the kind of bush i needed. I modified the bush that is in Vue in the plant editor and made my own little bush that i then populated across the foreground mountain. I added a couple of other plants to keep things interesting. I haven’t completely finished adding plants to the mountain and the next step is to figure out how to make Vue 5 not populate plants where i want the waterfall to be. Any ideas anyone? Please leave a comment.
Stay tuned…As the scene progresses I will be posting by end of day renders to this blog, wish me luck!