Modelling A Mountain

[sealpup]

i want to model a mountain for use in a scene where the camera zooms in onto a skier on the mountain, so it has to be highly detailed. The mountain needs to be similar to somthing in the rockies or europe, lots of bowls and ridges. I was wondering what the best and easiest way to do this is( Geometry type, Image Planes, Displacement Maps, Lofted Surfaces...??). If anyone knows of any tutorials or has any tips for me, your replies would be appreciated..

[aaron_johnson]

i would try distorting a large polygonal plane, perhaps with lots of overlapping wire deformers, this would give you good history control on the surface and a good jagged look for those sharp areas where u need them. with polys u have the advantage of having some surface edges smooth and some sharp, and u can also increase polys on specific areas such as rocky outcrops. yeah regardless of your modelling method u'll need to spend some time working on some detailed shading networks.... i wouldn't use displacement mapping - far too expensive for rendering and brings in other difficulties if u'll have a skier on the surface..... i'm assuming the skier is CG and not live action....? have fun

[stebbing]

Maya 4.5 now has a height map primitive which is good for doing mountains. If you have Maya 4.5 unlimited check out the example files called Terraine.ma and heightfield.ma which can be pulled up from the Get Fluid Example menu.
--Randy Stebbing

[nonquad]

Start with a mole hill, and exaggerate from there.

Ok but seriously. So I have this wacky idea: you could try using cloth.

I tried it myself; set some semi-random poly cones at different heights (pointy end up of course) as collision objects to form your peaks, and dropped a high-res poly plane cloth object over them. Naturally the topology sucks, but it actually produced some pretty decent bowls and ridges, with minimal effort. I also had a collision ground plane set. This worked pretty well, as this caused the ridges to extend around the base of the mountain in a pleasant way.

There were a few trouble spots where the cloth started to fold, but nothing sculpt->smoothness tool couldn't fix. And changing the cloth attributes and resolution could be used to almost dynamically affect the sagginess of the bowls, the bluntness of the ridges, etc. until you get a look you like.

While it's an amateur solution, you might still want to play with it for a minute. It could provide a starting point. Maybe use cloth to form your initial structure, render it out as a depth pass to texturize and detail in photoshop, and bring back as a height map...

[joojaa]

You could do virtulay the same with wrap deformers too.

[user_deleted]

I know this is the Maya forum but terragen can help you make beautiful mountains and landscapes. http://www.planetside.co.uk/terragen/images.shtml

[mantrid]

.....why not just spend a whole 10 minutes in Bryce and import the lot, including textures (you can of course improve the textures if you need to) as DXF or OBJ...Bryce is built specifically for this, and does a wonerful job.