Pipeline for the Environment

For my independent learning project, I roughly followed this pipeline.

I began obtaining images that showed the landscape, the building design as well as the plant life. Once I had obtained all my images I then went onto Google maps and located the area I was going to model and trimmed it down to a reasonable size. Whilst I was still on Google maps, I swapped between views so I could see the map version of the area as well as the satellite image. In my spare time I looked up the contour lines to see if there were any hills etc in my mapped area.

For the orientation stage I loaded the satellite and map images of Pripyat into 3ds max and placed them on a rectangle shape so that I could safely position my buildings and trees to accurately reflect the real town.

I skipped the 3d point generation stage because I was quickly running out of time to complete this project.

The structuring and modelling stage went by quickly for the buildings because Pripyat was a workers town so all the buildings were similar to housing commission so I made two different buildings and just duplicated them and swapped around textures. The trees were another matter however, they were incredibly difficult and time consuming to make. I followed many various documents and tutorials to get them right. Unfortunately I didn't keep record of them but most of them were from DT. I did however create a Ferris wheel but I ran out of time to merge it with my scene and texture it.

The texturing stage was fairly quick, I browsed Cg Textures to find some seamless HD quality textures. The hardest part was trying to find the right ones that would match the environment. I don't think I obtained the quality of the textures that I wanted.

The final 3d environment was finally finished however my 3ds max kept crashing due to the high amount of poly which came from the trees. As a result I had to remove most of the trees I had in the environment in order for it to run smoothly without any crashes. I then began rendering the environment which was quite difficult. Some how I accidentally added stuff to the renderer which forced the environment to turn white when it finished rendering. I liked this final result so I included it on the blog but I re-did the render and created I finalized product that was acceptable.

In the end I don't like the environment I made. I would of much preferred to create it in Unreal Engine but was unable to. Over the holidays I am planning to look into environmental modelling in much more detail so that I will be ready for next tri.