Scottish Highland - Project of the Day

[davidroberson]

So the project for the day is Scottish Highlands, or a rough approximation thereof. I had to browse for my own reference pics for this one, and looked at a wide variety of places without finding a particular image to focus on. That is why I said “approximation”. Rocks and grass are pretty simple, but difficult to texture it turns out. Not really news, just something I was bothered by today. My texture ended up fairly noisy, without the really fine grain noise I’d prefer for granite and grass. I have to build at 8K or more to improve on that, and I’m not sure my new laptop is capable of that. I may just test it out later tonight, if I’ve nothing better to do.

Though I’m reasonably happy with the results, the scenery lacks the dramatic touch a Scottish sky gives many of the pictures. I’m rendering out the hi-res (8K) version while I’m posting, so that will tell me if the teturing is going to be good enough. So, just one screenshot of the 4K version for now, plus graph and .tmd (no reason not to share and this one has a nice little trick that helped with the cliff/rock texturing a lot).

fiddle 211025 01.tmd (808.7 KB)

[davidroberson]

Okay, it looks pretty good at 8K! I made sure to export the height and albedo while I had it rendered out at that level, so generating meshes and normals will be easier to do with File Imports.

Here’s a screenshot zoomed in a bit closer:

[davidroberson]

As a little warm up today, I decided to “visit” Scotland again, this time with a more human scale terrain. I wish there was a way to set the base scale in meters and work in a part of a larger, existing terrain without being forced to work with a postage stamp sized terrain in the 3D view. You can “scale” in your head, which is what I did here, to about 1% of the actual scale, going by the size of the Heather and the displacement of it and the grass I did. That was essentially the point of the exercise, finding a way to fake plants in World Machine. You can do a similar trick to get trees using certain noises and Probability devices. For that, you basically work at about 10% of world scale.

This didn’t quite count as a Project of the Day, taking only a couple hours to experiment and build. I pretty much knew what I needed to do, I just had to find workable settings at each step, which is where most of my time was spent. So, I’m just tacking this post onto the Scottish Highlands project thread as a related effort.

fiddle 211028 01.tmd (338.8 KB)