Lufthansa and Terragen

    Lufthansa and Terragen

    A project recently shared on the Planetside Forums impressed us with its seamless integration and highly realistic results. We spoke with artist Marcin Gruszczyk about the project and he shares some details of his workflow.

    Marcin explains: “We were asked by Lufthansa to produce a still that would show both of their flagship airplanes, an Airbus A380 and a Boeing 747-8i, together in the air. We have an extensive library of cloudscape photography but couldn’t find a suitable image as we needed a certain perspective and focal length to be able to show both of them. I happened to have spent some time on a view of an alpine landscape some weeks before and proposed this image as the background for the shot. Lufthansa agreed on it and so I started working on a high resolution version.”

    Marcin exported an area of the original Terragen landscape to World Machine where he applied erosion and exported the processed heightfield back to Terragen. “After some general tweaks, I rendered two versions with slightly different sun positions in high resolution (10200 x 6800 pixels) and combined them later.”

    “The models of the airplanes had to be rendered in 3ds max. In order to obtain matching lighting conditions and reflections, I rendered the environment as HDR cube faces in Terragen and transformed them to an equirectangular panorama in another software.” This was before the spherical camera option was added to Terragen 3.

    Section of Terragen Environment Map for Lufthansa Shot

    “I am using Terragen also for rendering HDR environments for all of our air-to-air shots where we typically use real-world skies as backgrounds. Since Terragen’s output looks very realistic I’m able to get a convincing look quickly, and it renders very fast compared to other programs. Also, it’s good to know there’s always a way to achieve something you have in mind.”

    Planetside Software would like to thank Marcin Gruszczyk for sharing the details of his work on this project and congratulate him on a job well done. Learn more about Marcin’s work at his website www.mswee.net.

    All imagery in this article is Copyright Deutsche Lufthansa AG / mo cgi. All rights reserved.

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