L3DT Users' Community

I've got some new renders from a school project. I used L3DT and Maya w/ Mental Ray. First one is an overview map for an adventure (I used the 'Ortho-Oblique' method, similar to 'Plan Oblique Relief' method found here: http://www.shadedrelief.com/). 2nd one is a perspective render with some clouds matte-painted into the background in Photoshop.

Very nice!

Would you mind expanding on how you did the trees?

David Walters wrote:Very nice!

Would you mind expanding on how you did the trees?

Sure! Are you familiar with Maya?

It has a feature called "Paint Effects", which you can use to create plants, water, fire, other effects, but you can't render those with the Mental Ray renderer (only the native software renderer).

So I created a group (of 3) of the 2d Pine Tree Paint-Effect Sprites, and converted them to polygons (I had to correct the texture placement, and the transparency/cutout). This is the master Pine Tree object, which will be 'instanced' around the map.

The terrain itself is a high-res displacement (meaning it's a flat, textured plane until you hit 'render'). As such, I had to have a 'reference object' (the displacement texture converted to a simplified polygon mesh) in order to get the correct height for each group of pine trees.

With the 'reference object' selected, I used the "Paint Geometry Tool" (included in Maya Bonus Tools) to paint 'instances' of the master Pine Group around the space. Then I hid the layer that the reference-mesh is on, and rendered out the scene.

Hi Telarus,

That's a really nice method you've got there, and the results are pretty indeed. Well done.

Cheers,
Aaron.