Obviously not too much terrain in here... ;)
I made the "city"-model in 3ds max using several instances of the famous "greeble"-modifier which procedurally creates square shaped structures on objects and lets you assign different map channels to different object groups inside the main object randomly. Fun stuff!
Since I am a member of the alpha team as well, I had the opportunity to use the brandnew "population-on-objects"-feature to create the trees on top of the model. I can assure you, this is a fantastic new feature and it didn't take much longer to populate this quite dense mesh than it would take on a regular terrain.
The clouds receive shadows from surfaces, so it took quite some time to render.
WOW.... Outstanding render, and idea... and composition.... WOW!
Outstanding...
Interesting and well executed.
Sweet!
Looks fun to make Hannes.
" quite some time" ? :)
Thank you guys!
@Kadri: about 29 hours. Original resolution width: 3000px
Thanks Hannes.
Long render time but the image size isn't small either.
An animation would be nice.
That really sounds like fun, playing with this greeble stuff, and the result is astonishing! Any chance of a bigger render?
I'd love to do an animation, but that would take ages... :(
@Ulco: here is the original resolution.
Thanks Hannes, I'm going to publish this :D :D :D No serious, I won't. It's a great scene, even some water I noticed.
Quote from: Hannes on February 12, 2014, 09:37:36 AM
I'd love to do an animation, but that would take ages... :(
...
Make a cool camera pan-move after a small ship-or anything similar etc.- lowering onto the city in low res.
Maybe Planetside would use it by rendering it in high res for you for the publishing of 3.1 and it's new object instancing feature.
Not sure if they will bite ( :D ) but seriously why not?
That's really amazing. I love all the small power detailing all over the place. It looks like a section of a city that was bombed out 50 years ago and never rebuilt with trees growing inside former houses and filling in all the streets.
With regards to the greeble structures that were assembled in Max, was it just a partial build and the rest was instanced in TG or is what we're looking at the whole model? How were the shaders applied? Did they import as part of the model and attach themselves or did you have to surface all this inside TG? I could totally see something like this as major asset in game cinematic like Gears of War, or Halo, or something along those lines. I'd love as much information about this as you're willing to share.
Thanks again for the great image! Very inspiring!
-Greg
Don't know what to say................... 8)
your a star Hannes!
This is exciting ...so much coming forth. Thanks Hannes.
very nice render !
Holy crap, this is several kinds of nice... movie-quality CG
Thanks so much for your comments! That's really heartening (is this the right word?).
Here is a more detailed description (especially for Greg ;)) on how this model was done.
What you see is about six instances of the original model put aside to each other. They are rotated in 90° steps to avoid repeating patterns.
The model was made inside of Max out of a simple plane with (as far as I remember) about eight polys per side. I used the first instance of the greeble modifier, which creates a certain amount of square shaped structures with adjustable height and tapering. Additionally it adds smaller structures called widgets that have the same parameters you can use. For each creation of structures you can assign as many material groups as you like which are distributed randomly to each newly created structure.
I used three instances of Greeble each one creating new structures on top of the structures of the previous instance. As you can imagine this leads to a quite detailed model.
In Max I put a UVW mapping modifier with box mapping on top of the modifier stack and assigned a simple multi shader (without any textures - only coulors) to the model.
I then exported the whole thing as an .obj (which took quite some time!) and reimported the mesh into TG (which took seconds!). I opened the internal network of the model and found my multishader with a certain number of "subshaders". Then I only had to put some textures into the slots of the diffuse color, the displacement and the opacity. I used some textures with alpha maps which created even more details, so opacity was very important here.
I hope my description was halfways understandable. Feel free to ask if there are any questions.
That's great, so you did texture it in TG, though the shading groups were created in Max. Very interesting. Thanks again Hannes.
amazing work....
wow.
:)
Thanks for the description. Do you know the polygon count of the objects?
- Oshyan
One of those greeble planes has 4.2 millions polys. Here is a simple render of how it looks in Max without textures.
Impressive! How big is that on disk?
- Oshyan
The exported .obj has 517 MB. As TGO it's only 260. I have only 3GB of RAM, so TG handles it pretty well!