Lightwave and Photoshop tutorials:
Modeling, part one
Lighting, part one
Surfacing, part two
The Great Outdoors

by Eki Halkka

In this tutorial, we will create an outdoor scene from scratch, complete with some terrain, water, clouds and vegetation.

During the course of this tutorial I will link to other tutorials on the net. I will assume you have a good basic understanding of both Lightwave and Photoshop. What's not written here should be easily found from the manuals. We will use layout's displacement tools to create a shoreline.

We will begin our hike with some elevation maps.

1. Creating an elevation map

Open Photoshop.

Create a new file, with dimensions of 512X512 pixels. This is maybe a bit too high a resolution for our actual displacement needs, but i like starting with resolutions that are multipliers of 128, since many of photoshop's filters are tileable at these resolutions. This may also serve as a surface alpha mask in the future, haven't decided yet ;-) Also, the clouds filter doesn't give enough variation at smaller resolutions.

Set the colors 100 black and 100% white. Render difference clouds a few times.

You can use the "Last Filter" shortcut, [Ctrl+F]

Image > Adjust > Equalize.



This could be quite good an elev. map for a mountain range as is, but as we are looking for a shoreline, we will hand-paint it a bit. I used a 230 pixel soft brush to darken the left side of the image to full black, as this will be the area that's uder water. I also lightened the ground area with 50% white brush, and enhanced the contrast in part of the shoreline with a soft selection and level adjustments.


That's it for now. Let's Create the mesh next.

Next we will create a grid and displace it a bit.

Read page 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10