Pete Mc Nally's Blog

I have been crazy busy this past while so today at lunchtime I decided to use the hour creatively rather than play Battlefield. I had been thinking about a quick way to model a cave, something that may be transferable to a real-time scene at some point in the future. Natural rock is very easy to get wrong so I wanted to avoid the common pitfalls, I didn’t want to randomly layer up displacements and procedural bump maps (unusable for real-time) so I thought about some methods that might work and this is the first proof of concept. I used a Tessendorf style ocean modifier on a plane that I then collapsed bent into a cylindrical shape and modified with FFDs in 3dsmax. This came together pretty quick but I hit some strangeness in Max trying to add in fake caustics with a projector light which took up more time than it should. I rendered a zdepth pass that I used for depth of field and subtle fog in Photoshop and Magic Bullet Photolooks for grading. Here is a screengrab of the geometry in Max and the final image.

~ by petemcnally on December 9, 2011.

Posted in Personal Work
Tags: 1 hour, 3dsmax, 60 minutes, cave, environment, exterior, game art, photoshop, render, rock, screengrab, sea, stone