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This tutorial is for beginners
This tutorial will show you how to create from scratch your very own mountain scene with lake. We will then texture and animate a season change
Start a new scene and create a plane. Length 100 and width 100, segments 60.
You should end up with this in your top view
Now right click on the plane and select convert to editable poly like so
Right lets make the mountain. There are other tutorials out there which show you how to use maps etc to create the mountain but I will show you how to make one from scratch. Select vertices and go down to the bottom of the list until you see paint deformation, select push/pull. Adjust the size of the brush to your liking like so
With the push/pull button selected, start pulling the vertices to create mountains. Leave the center of the plane flat as this will be our water well. See below
My completed mountain ( you can add more segments to the plane and use a smaller brush size to create more detailed mountains)
Let's texture the mountain
Render the top view. Keep the render squared. I used 1000x1000 pixels.
Save the render as a jpeg. Open up photoshop or what ever you use. Crop the image so only the pixels of the mountain are seen but keep the map squared (eg 915x915, 1000x1000 etc) like so
What we are going to do now is paint over the map and use it as a texture to put onto our 3d model. Below I am using three textures. A rock, grass and water texture. I'm going to skip the painting step as it's pretty much common sense.
Here is my result
Go back to 3dmax and open the material editor. Select a material and add on the diffuse channel the mountain texture we have just created like so
Job done. A cool thing you can do now is edit the texture in photoshop and come back and check how it looks on the 3d model as max should reload the texture automatically. Here is my final render with depth of field added
We are now going to animate a season change. We are just going to make a desert texture much like we done the first time round. We then animate the textures blending from one to another in 3d max.
Open your mountain render that you rendered in the top view and in photoshop paint a desert landscape on it. Here are my two side by side
Open the material editor, choose any empty slot. On standard click and select blend. This will give us 2 materials to blend together
In material 1 will be our first texture we made and in material 2 will be our desert texture. Go to frame 100, turn on animate and slide the mix amount to 100. This will make our first texture blend into our second texture over the 100 frames. Render and check it out.
Still render
Animated
Original tutorial by 3dmodelsheets.com 23/10/10