Colin's Virtual Environment: Week 7

As from the list of the tasks of our group discussed on. My job is to create the background environment of the Zurich lake in 1892. I find just researching the area is harder than I would have expected. Very hard and rare to find images when its history is based in the 1800s. Although I could not find the exact year of it but I was luckily able to search for this image of an early stage.

The first tourist Steamship gate at Bauschanzli in Zurich (1835-1883). This is probably the closest image I can get but I now have some idea what it looks like and how I am going to model to its similarity. It has the lake, mountains, trees and buildings, so this is exactly what I need. Texturing the lake, trees and mountains should not be a problem for me but the buildings is a challenge especially when there are no colours in this image but hopefully in the end I will have the full environment completed on week 9.

The work:

Ok this is it, I need to create the whole environment. I start with the more nicer surface and thats the lake. Using the same method that I have done with from year 2 it is more useful as I did enjoy creating water. Ok to start of with, I've applied a cylinder which in large scale.

Now for the water effects. I open up Material Editor, for the Ambient I need a blue colour for the water. I then set its Specular level to 121 and Glossiness as 50.

By selecting Maps, I go to Reflection and choose Raytrace to get some effects.

Underneath I select Bump, then Noise and it allows me to open up the Coordinates. With this I can then set the size to 8.0.

The Noise Parameters also needs to be set to Fractal.

By testing to see if the water is suitable enough for the actual environment, I've applied an Omni-light then rendered it to see the result.

It doesn't look too disappointing but with a few adjustments to the effect of the water, it should like fabulous.

The next tast is to model the mountains/ cliffs. I thought this would be some challenge to me as concrete rocks are related to to the textures of the mountains. Here is the first attempt. I use a simple plane then by setting its:

width: 232.987
length: 360.381
length segs: 64
width segs: 64

By converting it to a Polygon I can then use Vertex to shape out the plane so I can get dents and form hills as required. Ticking Use Soft Selection I then model the mountain more in depth.

Ok so I've now added cliffs, I also wanted to model the environment correctly to the design from the storyboard and so I've created another sets of mountains but this will contain a different texture to the ones in front. Using the same method for the cliffs, I've simply changed the size more larger and then position them behind the cliffs.

For the textures, I've find it hard to search any resources from the Internet to help me so that I can use the Material Editor. With no luck, I needed textures and so by searching for images of rock/ cliff textures, I've found this one.

Now you can see I have the sea, the cliffs and the mountains (which needs textures).

Again having the same problems finding resources/ tutorials, I've used another image that contained snow. With some simple editing on Photoshop, I clone certain features to get the whole image as a one.

The next part is easy, just apply the bitmap image onto the Material Editor and drag it to the model. Render it and we have the mountain.

As the progress is getting along nicely, I feel I needed to add one more features to the environment before I finish the week and that's the sky. One of the best methods to creating a sky is using a cylinder because it surrounds the area and gives more accuracy to the environment.