Using Surfaces

[Jose Antonio Dorado]

Post here your questions and comments about the Using Surfaces tutorial.

[cg24a3]

Where can I get terrain with maps like in this tutorial? was it created in world machine or is it a real geo data?

[iToo]

Paul, our training master, is now attending at SOA 2015, but i copy here his reply from other forum:

The terrain data comes from DEM files freely downloadable from http://www.usgs.gov/pubprod/ . These were then stitched together and then used with a displace modifier to create the landscape with corresponding satellite images (also available from USGS) to create the textures.

Starting at http://nationalmap.gov/viewer.html , from here you can download separate elevation data (essentially a greyscale height map) and seperate ortho imagery (colour data). However it is usually split into a number of tiles and will need to be reassembled. You might find this tutorial set by Gnomon workshop useful for learning more about this workflow:  http://www.thegnomonworkshop.com/store/category/5/ . The 3D part is in Maya but it's easy enough to translate to Max.

[cg24a3]

Thank you very much, for your help, this is quite useful info.

[skyeboysteve]

When opening the MR file, I get this error message (attached).  Perhaps there's some V-Ray materials that are in the scene?  I'm very interested in your sky; as rendered in the video, (though it renders as a very dark simple blue sky in the MR file--no clouds etc), and the terrain looks very shiny (like plastic--perhaps an MR translation of a V-ray material?).  I realize this is probably not that important for the purposes of the tutorial, but have seen similar errors before when opening other MR tutorial files downloaded from this site, and am wondering if perhaps I'm doing something wrong.

Thanks for your time.

[Paul Roberts]

Hi,

My apologies for the problems with the exercise files. The missing DLL dialog is caused by some leftover V-Ray render elements, I've removed these and new files are being uploaded, they'll be available shortly.

The sky in the scene is generated by using an HDRI map by Peter Guthrie as a light source. Unfortunately because these are not free we cannot redistribute them in our scene files so I have to swap them out for a sun/sky system. The same is true for the V-Ray exercise files. If you are interested in using HDRIs here are a couple of posts by Peter that you may find useful: HDRI Sky Lighting for interiors and HDRI Lighting Workflow. Both reference V-Ray but the same principles can be easily converted to Mental Ray.

You're right about the materials, they were converted from V-Ray and are subsequently too glossy.  This has also been toned down in the new files.

Thanks for reporting these issues, if there's anything else I can help with, please let me know.

Kind regards,

Paul

[skyeboysteve]

Thank you Paul for your quick response and explanation.