Mountain development

After working out the texturing pipeline I started modelling mountains. At first distant mountains and the when we decide against having any the looney mountain its self. I looked at real mountain reference swell as folded paper. Here is pictures of some of that development! The techniques ranged from 3D in photoshop using black and white maps to different techniques within maya.

So I spent weeks and weeks developing my lonely mountain with a lot of failed attempts and here is some development of that.

Firstly I tried to create the mountains using 3D in photoshop. You do this by using a file with a transparent background the using the 3D tab, filter,render Difference clouds.

Then using 3D, new mesh from grayscale you get above ^^ in the 3D workspace. You can edit the shapes by changing the grayscale image the proportions of black and white change the shape. the whiter the mark the higher the point.

When you bring the displacement map into Maya and put it onto a plane it looks like this ( can only see in the render initially ) Have to make sure it's mental ray. Then when your happy with the render you can convert the displacement map to polygons.

If you edit the blacks and whites of the displacement map you get different shapes. I decided this wasn't going to work for our mountains as they were to rounded. and not papery enough.

This mountain was done by simple pulling the vertices from the plane up. However this still wasn't giving us the shape we were looking for.

After doing some referencing using real paper folds we started getting closer to what we were looking for a nice papery look.

These mountains have a scrunched up paper feel

They were to messy though and two many un structured triangle in the mesh.

 

They also didn't look right when smoothed.

  

This mountain^ shows the beginnings of the final models structure. The four main folds with smaller folds in between.

This is the beginning of the final mountain and shows how it developed combining parts of the pervious models. Making sure to make the edges really hard and straight.

Texture maps

  

Some photographic pointy mountains used for reference.