Playing with 3d Ecosystems

[GunnerMan]

Well I am new to Vue and I have been doing loads of tutorials(mainly from here) and I did expand on one of em as of late because I know it will come in handy. That is the 3d Ecosystem.

I got the idea this could create a great base for some sort of rockslide. So what I did was create a mountain face and added a few valley type features in it to give the rocks a flow direction that way they were not just falling all over the place. Then I made about 7 or so cubes and modified their shape and rotation to fit where the rocks should be. I then populated them with an Ecosystem as described in your tutorial.

Then I was not satisfied that I had enough debris flying to really simulate the chaos of a rock slide so I made a flat plane along the face of the hill and populated it with very large funtion settings and small rocks to creat the effect of rocks flying about.
Id say the hardest part of the whole thing was finding a decent terrain texture and then finding a good material for the broken rocks that looked like they were similar but not so similar that there was not enough contrast between the two. I think i could have used a few less rocks or a bit smaller ones but maybe ill go back to it. the scene i created for myself was really limited to what I could realisticly include.

So here it is, I found these forums downsized the image considerably so I hot linked...
http://img165.imageshack.us/my.php?imag ... 122pz3.jpg

I rendered it with the "Final" preset because I don't know about render settings yet. It rendered at a size of 1280x960, I then adjusted the levels a tad in Photoshop and resampled it to 800x600(for forums) in IRfanview. 8)

[Grinder]

That looks pretty cool. Maybe you could add some dust from the mayhem and maybe some flying dirt on the leading edge. Looks really good though, almost real.

[GunnerMan]

I experimented with the dust, I tried a bunch of cloud combinations, I tried a volumetric material on a cube. None seemed to give me that dusty look I was going for. I came close with a cloud set once but I could not get a full coverage, it was spotty. Same with the volumetric texture. I am using almost all default materials, plants, etc right now.

I figured since it was a rocky rockslide I could let the dust and dirt slide this time. But you are right it would benifit from those additions. Im not sure how I would create "dirt" that looks like it was flowing well. Maybe create some sort of very thick but scattered volumetric material to work with would do the trick. I am going to explore the rock slide a bit more from a different perspective, may give me a chance to work on some sort of dirt fill.

[Grinder]

Maybe you could make some rocks with dirt material, scale them way down, add them with the invisible mesh routine and then add a blur. Might be a pain to render though. Probably make a high poly count but you never know.

[vovka]

One part of ecosystem 3D tutorial, that never made out was, creating water fall with it. It took too long rendering and removed from tutorial.
But here is tip, you lack of motion blur in ther, rocks look to static, to add blur motion, create anmation key frame on 3d material, move 3 frames ahead, now move 3d material to slide direction and create other keyframe. Move to middle of animation and render frame on "broadcast" or higher settings. Your rocks will come a live with motion blur. by increasing distance in material location on first and last frame, you will have higher or lower motion blur. It little bit tricky at first, but after couple trys, you get greate result.

[PapaSkip]

Looking good! I'm pretty new at this myself so I can't really offer any valid suggestions. Definitely looks like a small rock fall in progress. I haven't tried this one yet ... hope mine looks as good when I do!

Skip

[GunnerMan]

Thanks for the tip vovka, only problem is it confused the hell out of me, I went to Add keyframe and there are a whole bunch of Keyframes, I clicks Add to all properties and it took me to the animation wizard where I proceded to render my block of rocks sliding down the hill...

So how do I set the frames, all it gave me was a time option. So lets say I have added the keyframe to 3dmaterial 1(top rockpile) Now what? Do I manualy move it in the view port? Or do I need to set the travel path from point A to Point C and then back to point B?

Sorry for my complete misundertsanding :oops:

Also last nght I tried to make "Dirt" with a bunch of small rocks. I ended up with 240 mil polygons worth of rocks and it didnt look half bad actualy. It could work but your right the poly count would be through the roof.

[Grinder]

Yeah I kinda figured it would substantially up the poly count. Would be kind of interested to see how it looks, I might have to try it on a small scale just to see how it looks.

[vovka]

need to search if i still have "edited" part of tutorial, if not i will make short addon

[Paula Sanders]

Vovka -

I am working on a waterfall now and would love to see your tutorial even if the rendering takes a while. I, also, am not too sure how to use the key frames for this purpose. I know how to animate a scene, but am a little confused here. Maybe when I try it, it will become clearer. I have copied your directions.