Yesterday I made a simple 3D wooded area in Maya and I just thought I'd show you how I did it:
I began by creating a polygon plane by clicking: [Create - Polygon Primitives - Plane]
I added subdivisions in the [Attribute Editor] on the right hand side of the screen. I gave it 100 x 100 as I wanted the hilly sections to look smooth as they are going to be covered in snow in the final scene.
By [right clicking and scrolling down to paint] I brought up the [sculpt] menu where I used the pull tool to drag hill shapes out of the plain before smoothing the hills off with the smooth tool.
Once I had my hilly surface I added some colour by [right clicking on the plane and navigating down to assign favourite material - Lambert]. The in the [Attributer Editor] I changed the colour to white to give it the snow effect I wanted.
To make trees I started off with an EP Curve by clicking [create - EP Curve]. I then opened the [front view] and drew out the wavy line that my tree trunk would be based on.
The next step was to make a cylinder so I clicked [create - polygon primitive - cylinder] and made a small cylinder and the foot of the EP Line. I then lined it up the that the line was in the centre of the cylinder and the rotated the cylinder to follow the direction of the line.
I then switched the cylinder to Face Mode by [holding down right click and selecting Face from the pop up menu]. I then selected each triangular face at the top of the cylinder by [clicking and holding shift].
Once all the faces were selected I and while still holding down shift I [selected the EP Curve]. I then selected [Polygons from the drop down menu at the top right of the screen] which brought up a new selection of options along the top bar. I clicked [Edit Mesh - Extrude].
I began by creating a polygon plane by clicking: [Create - Polygon Primitives - Plane]
I added subdivisions in the [Attribute Editor] on the right hand side of the screen. I gave it 100 x 100 as I wanted the hilly sections to look smooth as they are going to be covered in snow in the final scene.
By [right clicking and scrolling down to paint] I brought up the [sculpt] menu where I used the pull tool to drag hill shapes out of the plain before smoothing the hills off with the smooth tool.
Once I had my hilly surface I added some colour by [right clicking on the plane and navigating down to assign favourite material - Lambert]. The in the [Attributer Editor] I changed the colour to white to give it the snow effect I wanted.
To make trees I started off with an EP Curve by clicking [create - EP Curve]. I then opened the [front view] and drew out the wavy line that my tree trunk would be based on.
The next step was to make a cylinder so I clicked [create - polygon primitive - cylinder] and made a small cylinder and the foot of the EP Line. I then lined it up the that the line was in the centre of the cylinder and the rotated the cylinder to follow the direction of the line.
I then switched the cylinder to Face Mode by [holding down right click and selecting Face from the pop up menu]. I then selected each triangular face at the top of the cylinder by [clicking and holding shift].
Once all the faces were selected I and while still holding down shift I [selected the EP Curve]. I then selected [Polygons from the drop down menu at the top right of the screen] which brought up a new selection of options along the top bar. I clicked [Edit Mesh - Extrude].
This extruded the cylinder along the EP Curve giving me the wonky shape that I wanted. Then in the [Attribute Editor] I dragged the [Taper scroll bar down to zero (or somewhere near by)] to give it a point at the tip of the trunk.
As this was just a pre-viz mock up of an environment I saved time by just duplicating the trunk and resizing it to make the branches. Once I had found a place on the trunk for each branch I clicked [Mesh - Combine] to stick them to it.
Like with the snowy surface I gave the trees some colour by [holding down right click - Assign Favourite Material - Lambert].
I then duplicated the trees, changed the size of them slightly and shifted them around my scene.
As this was just a mock up to do some tests on we used it to play around with lighting. The scene is set at night so the only light we will see is moonlight. I added a couple of rough block characters to see how the moonlight would effect them as we wanted them to be heavily shadowed.
For these shots I created a direction light by clicking [Create - Lights - Directional Light]. I played around with colour and added some faint blue to it to try and mimic moonlight. These are how the rough tests came out:
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