Last year I forgot to publish this image, surely because it was suddenly abandoned due to some urgent matter that I do not remember now…
Here I was modelling little portions of the Amazon river, using Google Maps images as guides for the scene creation. Until I had to abandon it, I tried several spots that looked interesting… but there were plenty of places that looked as good candidates. In general the composition of most of the scenes was this one:
- The base terrain is a heightfield, hand-painted over a Google Maps screenshot.
- The texture on the terrain is also guided by an slightly blurred version of the heightfield map, so there can be different textures on the river bed and the forest terrain.
- There are 50,000 POVTrees, using only 4 different meshes. The tree sizes and distribution are half-guided by a pigment function, which uses again a blurred version of the heightfield map, this time more blurry. The idea was to make the trees smaller and the forest less dense at the river sides.
- The river is just a plane, with a bump map also hand-painted in The Gimp, and a simple orange-scattering media under it for the “muddy water” effect.
- The huts were made with Wings3D in about a minute (well, maybe two…) and the smoke column was borrowed from my office scene (the cigarette smoke).
- Of course, skylight.inc was used for the sky dome and lighting.
- There is also a plane above the camera with a semi-transparent, turbulent leopard pattern, to cast some shadows into the forest.
- Render time was 40 min for the first pass, and just 20 for the final one.
Update Oct-2012
I’ve uploaded the sources for this one, as a visitor asked for them. Note there is a missing image (sup06.jpg) which I can’t redistribute, but you can replace it with any image of soil/sand (better if it’s seamless).
WIPS
