Building Terrain In Maya With Earthsculptor

[earthsculptor]

Hey Guys, I'm the author of EarthSculptor, a realtime 3D heightmap editor, specifically designed for quickly creating landscape and painting on them. I want to know how you guys generally build terrains in maya, and if you use any 3rd party tools like leveller, terragen, and vue to do so. Up until now EarthSculptor has been mainly a tool for the game developer community but with this beta I've added an .obj exporter that outputs optimized meshes and a plug in system so that I hope it will end up being used by a broader audience, mainly 3D artists. There's a free beta demo on my website www.earthsculptor.com that I hope you guys can check out and as Maya artists give me some feedback if this application would be useful to you.

To get Earthsculptor maps into maya, create your map, export .obj (it will export uvs and normals). Export terrain texture which bakes all the textures to a file (turn off the light map as you'll be using maya to render the lighting). Drag the exported .obj map into maya. Change the material ambient of the map to the exported terrain texture.

Much Thanks

Ernest

[joojaa]

Usually i convert a dem map to a heightfield, subtract higpass form this map, import that on a rurbs plane with sculpt surfaces tool displace the plane for a rough shape, and apply the highpass between what i actually got rendered out and what my original was as displacement along with a procedural gravel texture. Paint in some bolder and sculpt the relatively dense nurbs mesh in areas where i need change and smooth out the displacement similliary with paint surfaces.

The result is at rendertime because of fine micropolygonisation the same is i would render a 2-6 million poly map. Thisway i can get most out fo resources, and it takes less than 5 minutes to do.

Or if i need a more wierd map i just sculpt it directly in maya then render the heightfield as a floatingpoint map with some procedural noise on top and rebuild the above steps.