CREATE A STEAMPUNK ICELANDIC LANDSCAPE
In this tutorial I’m going to take you through my personal workflow used in the creation of environments with 3ds Max and Corona Renderer. I will take you from concept, to modelling, to rendering and finally, postproduction in Photoshop.
This workflow is written with the end goal of creating a vast landscape, while teaching you various techniques that you can RenderMan meets photo-surrealism Practical tips and tutorials from pro artists to improve your CG skills apply to any of your projects moving forward.
As this is quite an in-depth process, I will be assuming you have some existing 3D knowledge and will try to explain everything in manageable steps, but won’t be going too in-depth on the more basic principles. If you are unfamiliar with Forest Pack or Corona Renderer I would recommend checking out some tutorials on those. If you are a V-Ray user, you should be able to follow along very closely as they are quite similar render engines. Let’s get started!
CONCEPT AND DESIGN
01 MOOD BOARDS
When starting a new project it’s important to collect reference images and create a mood board. This project was based on a mountainous Icelandic landscape.
02 THUMBNAIL SKETCHING
After collecting reference and putting together a mood board, start sketching out some ideas. Don’t get too bogged down in the details, keep things loose and just think about the major forms and composition.
03 FINAL CONCEPT
Once the concept is down, it’s time to take it a bit further and develop the idea before moving into 3ds Max for blocking.
BLOCKOUT, VEGETATION AND ENVIRONMENT MODELLING
04 INITIAL BLOCKOUT
Once inside of 3ds Max, set up the system and display units scale (Customise>Units Setup). This project used the metric system. Set the system units to centimetres and display units to metres (the display units can be set to your preference, the system units are the important thing here).
Start off by either importing a base mesh of a person if you have one (ZBrush ships with some), or make a biped (Creation tab>Systems>Biped) and make sure they are scaled to a realistic size, between 160cm to 180cm tall. These are going to work as the scale reference.
05 BLOCKING GEOMETRY
Create a plane around 20m long and 10m wide, keep the segments to 4x4. Keep the geometry low at this early stage. Convert the plane to an editable polygon and begin to
