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AlphaCentury, a Terrain Creation Tutorial

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#61

thank you, ZB’s! :smiley:

FYI: i just uploaded a Zanadu-Terrain to 3d-commune. to avoid any further disqualification :frowning: i will edit this message and upload the pic here (as well as the full-sized alpha) as soon as the contest is done. in the very unlikely case of being among the winners, i - as another proud owner of a full-version - would love to pick up Stonecutter’s :+1: :+1: :+1: idea (his 3rd message in the thread) and award one of the demo-users who keep contributing such great art to ZBC despite of the restrictions of the demo (and i know what i’m speaking about, as i had to use the demo for 4.5 months ;)) - any ideas on how to make the choice would be mucho appreciated (please post to Stonecutter’s thread in the community-forum!)

thanks again for all the great feedback! can’t wait for your vista’s, amigas y amiguys!

  • juandel :smiley:

:red_circle: edited as per 11-08-01:

phew! glad to learn that i won’t have to choose among those fantastico and fantastica demo-users :smiley: and congratulations, Ztevie, Christos and PusGhetty! you all did wonderful jobs! :smiley: … so here we go:

it was created using this alpha, which was done with gear and elongated spheres:

seagull by atom-art, of course :wink:

that was fun and quickly done… in fact it was a lunch-break-pic!

#62

:+1: Looks awesome Juandel.

#63

Had to tell you what a great landscape you produced, Juandel! :+1: :+1: :+1:
This one definitely does have that ‘Zanadu’ feeling. As far as this contest goes, I hope one of the members does win it, and that we can get a newbie-boogie going. Think of the great rookie-demo thread we could end up with! :smiley: :smiley: :smiley: :+1: :smiley: :smiley: :smiley:

#64

this moonshine

goes to you, Stonecutter! :smiley: :smiley: :smiley: :stuck_out_tongue:

i’m sorry for it’s darkness, but it’s late over here, and i already pushed the "PLAY"button for a lil private PWS (Pre-Werwolfic-Syndrome) Blues :D!

the trick i experimented with in this one was applying the alpha to a 3d-terrain (one of the graphs in the initialize-menu under modifiers det to almost zero, globalambient towards zero) instead of a plane. the “moon” is a pointlight set a bit further away on z-axis than the background / skyplane’s settings. i goofed up when i tried to “improve” the pre-moonclouds in PS. mucho to learn still about perspective, antialiasing, environment-rendering - to mention just those that manage to come to my mind despite of the onset of PWS! :eek:

hooooooo-owlandel :smiley:

edit: any owl i might do i might do goes to you, WingedOne! :smiley:

#65

Zanadu as seen from candy-forest :slight_smile:

this one was originally started to be uploaded to 3d-commune’s Zanadu-contest, but i ended up with (for my taste) way too much postproduction in PS to make it a contribution of a zbrush-contest. reason is: sillyme did it on my imac (which houses meagre 64mb ram only) at 960x1240 pixels - so it was mucho time-consuming to watch transformations getting rendered and as i want to have dinner now, i ended up doing the sky with the PS-cloud-filter instead of creating another layer for a plane to paint on in zbrush, and i stamped a lil here and there to avoid repetitions in the foreground candy-texture and some PS-smudging :frowning:

there is just 1 alpha i made use of: as you can see in the background it was done with the gear-tool (one put above the other, slightly smaller and pushed into front in transformation w-mode) and a few 3d-cones. i then loaded Davey’s super-duper Tiler-script and tiled the alpha the flipping way, applied it to another plane, z-offset it a few times and forgot about using the smooth-function :mad:. i increased the h- and v-repetitions in the textures-modifiers of the plane-tool and thus created the pillars and the forest-floor.

i hope you like it better than i do :smiley:

  • juandel
#66

Moonshine and Candy forest are wonderful, you seem to have an unending source of inspiration stuck around somewhere. Moonshine is beautifully done and the perspective and color of the Zanadu one is considered by me to be superdooper, PS or no, I would be happy about it.

#67

:+1: Juandel,

The candy theme and the look of that tower in the distance makes me think molded custard or “flan”. This also reminds me of the scene in The Wizard of Oz when they first see the emerald city in the distance. I love this terrain technique also, and here’s one that I did a while ago.

I keep getting those grid marks which in this case doesn’t look so bad. I suppose I could figure out why this is happening if I travelled backwards by 66 postings and read the instructions more closely. Let’s make this thread a true “century” and see if we can push it to 100 postings :smiley:

#68

Here’s my contribution to the ‘100’, Zoid, but it’s not just an empty post…
I have to say that is one of the more outrageous ‘terrains’ I’ve seen done here, and that’s why this thread is so interesting to watch. We’re getting terrains, nouveau terrains, pseudo terrains, organic and inorganic terrains… :grimacing:
What’s next! Great work, Zoid and everyone else, and I think I’m experiencing terrain envy!!! :+1: :+1: :+1: to every artist on this thread!

#69

ha! 100 posts? a century means hundred years, so i guess there will be much more in 2101 :smiley: what a :+1: :+1: :+1: terrain, Zoid, grid-marks fit perfectly (don’t know what is the reason for them, probably the h-v-divide of the tools one does the alpha with or something in the realation between alpha-size and plane-size). i especially love the water - and it’s ripples. may i ask: how done? TIA! :smiley:

  • juandel
#70

not done on purpose, but at a certain point i recognised what it looks like: some unspectacular landscape in northern austria flying by an intercity train’s window :slight_smile:

a lil more dramatic, my newest liquid terrain study: poor bloke in distress - blokehead and seagulls courtesy Atom Art, open hands courtesy Martin

  • juandel
#71

Boy, Juandel, you really love the terrain creation method! There’s no doubt that you are our resident master on this subject, as these two scenes testify. Really great stuff. The water is excellent, but my favorite of the two is the landscape. You may call that country unspectacular, but it has a pastoral beauty all its own.

#72

Created a while ago, but since they were made possible by and done using the method taught by Pixolator, it seems appropriate to put them into this thread.

The Fractal Garden was created using a fractal for the deformation mask, rather than a grabbed alpha. In fact, every single thing in the scene is influenced in some way by or created with fractals.

The Ruins on Coreolis Prime used the method completely as taught but focused on the Spiral3D tool to create the ruins. The head is a simple Poser import with a material created to simulate the old weathered look.

#73

Aurick, Your zscapes are are true classics. The fractal garden has wonderful sharpness and depth. I hope you do more of these.

Juandel, I’m so sorry to leave you hanging with your question about the ripples in my image. The sad fact is that I have forgotten how I did it, and I have been unable to duplicate this effect. Perhaps there is a certain expert out there :wink: who knows what makes this happen? If it ever happens again for me I will let you know what it was. I love your “train window landscape”. I ride a train to work every morning and I never get tired of that - landscape zipping by the window effect :cool:

#74

ah, what a pity, Zoid :frowning: let’s hope for a ripplemaster to show up here soon or that you happen to recreate it yourself! TIA

Aurick, it’s great you put those two fantastico ones up here, too :smiley: the second one took me into it for half an hour once again. superb.

thank you both for your kind feedback!

here is another liquid-terrain study:

tried it with transparency this time which made rendering rather time-consuming, as flatten-layer has to be turned off.

the checkered layer basically consists of a 3d-terrains to which two alphas were applied. a transparent checkertexture was applied, then the terrain was snapshot, untextured, coloured, got another material & was set a bit lower. on a separate layer i did the ball, mrgbz-grabbed it (other layers were turned off) to win a texture for a later environment-rendering. this layer was merged with the checker-terrain one to reduce the amount of layers and save a lil rendering time.

on another layer i recreated the terrain, rotated it slightly, increased the materials transparency to about 95 and set it’s environmental reflectivity to about 30. this layer was duplicated and the new one moved downwards via the layers/modifiers/displaceZ by 1. one of the transparent layers was rendered with environment-texture on (where i placed a vertically mirrored transparent texture of the former ball-layer), which i hoped would give a nice reflexion of the ball, the other one with environment-scene on (as flatten-layers was off for transparency’s sake, it reflected itself and the lights only, i think) - i played with different settings for FOV for both renderings, but as the settings in the environment renderer obviously are not saved :confused: with the document i dunno which ones i finally took.

being a bit bored by the tedious renderings i imported the exported .psd in another document as a texture, filled the canvas with it and played with the settings in the render/adjust-modifiers. looking at it via my other monitor it looked too bright and so i ended up making a few additional brightness adjustments in photoshop.

#75

a lin-pao shaman waiting for pan-da, the bamboo-ghost to show up :smiley:

this one started at 640x480 as a terrain with a mountain painted with TextureMaster’s help, which was put into the scene several times, afterwards i fiddled with the adjustment settings. the front mountain looked way to flat and the pic was mucho boring, so i tried to improve by putting in some branches but this did not help either. i exported the pic, started a new document at 480x640 this time and filled the canvas with the re-imported pic. z-brush stretched the frontmountain all by itself :smiley: the green shadings down there (BTW: no .jpg-compression nono’s, i think this is the result of my tweaking the fog-graph) reminded me of asian rice-terraces - so i decided to put a few things in front to enforce my own impression. i was a bit confined by the lightsettings of the background and as the branches are on the background, too, the shaman is sitting just 100 points on z-axis away from the mountains :smiley: of course, this did not allow for much work on depth-cue or depth by fog. the chinese hat came in handy to cover my poor head-modelling skills :smiley: and the idea of the bamboo-ghost was born only after i realized that the guy sitting there looked like he would -ahem- enjoy himself (instead of enjoying the vista ;)). hope you’ll like it better, my friends!

  • juandel
#76

LOL, Juandel. I hadn’t considered that possible interpretation of his position until you said something, and now it’s stuck in my brain like a bad song that you just can’t get rid of.

The picture is lovely. Without a doubt, it’s the most sophisticated use of terrain generation scene creation that you have tried yet. The landscape by itself would have been very nice, indeed. The additions of the Chinaman and the bamboo add to the scene in great ways.

By the way, I love the flowers.

#77

What an A M A Z I N G wee picture juandel!
I just couldn’t leave this thread without saying something! Magic!

#78

Beautiful Juandel, I love the rice paddies in the distance and the use of greens, blues and yellows in the image. I wouldn’t worry about the z values in this case you have scaled and blended everything perfectly to give that feeling of spaciousness and distance. It, as most all of your pieces, is gentle to the eye and soul of the viewer. I love it

#79

Very nice, Juandel!! :+1: :+1: :+1:
I love the depth and perspective you achieved in this.
As a wise old one said, (I think his name was soo-thern), 'Don’t model what you can’t see…)
The things you can’t see in this one are there anyway, thanks to your magic!
:+1: :+1: :+1: :sunglasses: :+1: :+1: :+1:

#80

What a beautiful picture Juandel! Your landscapes are all so great, and keep getting better. It started as Pixolator’s terrain tutorial, but I think you’re becomming the landscape master on the forum.

The Chinese gentleman really adds a whole new dimension to this one. I would have never guessed the actual shallowness on this image. The sense of depth with the figure, branches, and beautiful flowers makes this appear like a far expanding image. Beautiful landscape :+1: :+1: