LightWave and Photoshop tutorials:
Modeling, part one
Lighting, part one
Surfacing, part two

5. Ground surface

In the Layout start by clearing the scene. Load ground02.lwo. Set the surface double sided and smoothed.

Set the grid size to 2m. Reset camera position. Move the camera to a nice composition and give it a key frame.

Okay... let's say that we want the parts of the object that are underwater to have a dark brown tone (It is a lake, ok?). And the parts that are at the waterline to have a muddy, light brown surface. And the higher grounds should be grassy. How can we accomplish this?

So far we know that the highest parts of the ground were at 3 meters when the object was displaced. We later centered the object, so the highest parts should be at 1.5m, and the bottom of the lake should be -1.5m.

For now, let's keep our waterline at Y 0m, then we can use the grid as a water reference. ;-)

We will start from ground up this time, so let's give the object a dark, lake bottom like color, 50,40,30 (RGB).

Add some default crumple bumps:



For the waterline, let's add some lighter brown fractal noise in the color channel.



Give the texture a falloff of 150% in the Y axis, and render.



Notice that the contrast and small power settings have been raised a bit.

Now it's the time for you to experiment some. Add 3-4 more layers of color fractals, vary all the settings and color a little each time.

What you have should be close to the above. Varying the parameters for each layer breaks up the recognizable fractal noise pattern.

Let's add some serious crumple to this one:



Again with a falloff of 100-150%. After this add one layer (Yes you can copy it ;-) of specular fractal noise, in the same manner as described for the color channel. Default glossiness of 64 looks good enough.

This is all for now for the shoreline:



Next, let's add the grass. We will use the veins texture in the color channel, with the following settings.



And, as you have prolly already guessed, we will again use falloff in the Y axis. Only thing different from the ground's falloff thingy is that the texture's center is moved one meter up in the Y axis, thus affecting only the upmost part of the ground:



Now just add 2-3 slightly variated Grass/Veins texture layers.



It's been WAAAYYY too long since we last saved, so let's do just that.

Next we will pour in the water.

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