Modelling mountains?
 

Hello!
I will need to model mountains for my scene, so I was thinking is there a way perhabs that you make an alpha map, and us it as hight map for generating mountains? I have heard about terragen, but can you export actaul model to Maya and modify it later? Is there perhabs any tutorial or tips about it?
Tnx!

Hmm, you are probably thinking of a bump map. basically, you just make a greyscale image of what you want your mountains to look like from overhead. You take this image and map it to a plane's shader's bump map attribute.

umm... I'm not entirely sure how easy it would be to make mountains from a bump map though. Seems like it'd be easier to simply model.

No, I don't mean bumb maps. I mean if there is any function in Mayaor plugin that helps you making a mountain easier. I have seen somewhere(can't remember where) that you can make the mountain with terragen and export the mesh into maya. With bumb maps you actually simulate bumbs, but what I need here is actual model of mountains.
I hope I said it clear. Tnx anyway for trying to help me :)

p.s.: oh, and with that alpha map I ment if there is a way to generate a model (and not bumb on a singel plain) using that alpha map. So at the end of process, you have the model of mountain, not only a singel plane (where the results are only seen when rendered).

create a nurb plane, 50 subdivisions, and use nurb sculpt tool to push and pull the plane into mountain shapes.

Read up on displacement mapping.

Tnx for suggestions!
@NitroLiq:
yeah, I just found out about that thing and it just what I need. :)
The only problem is, that when I convert displ. map into polys, it has a height of 0 (or at least I think so;when you look it from the side view, it looks just like a plane), so I have to scale it when it's already converted (which is not a problem). Anyone know perhabs why?

0 is the default. You can edit the attribute in the displacement shader.

make a nurbs plane with 50 x 50 spans

nurbs scuplt tool

assign a map to control displacement

set max displacement

afterwards you may want to convert it to polygons -> convert with "fit" option, that way you get only a few polygons ...

you got better control that way than using disp-maps directly

Someone gave me a link to a superb mountain tutorial a few days ago, too bad I don't have it anymore, Since it screwed up maya so badly that I couldn't restart it :). But I must say bump mapping in 2d and 3d combined is quite effective, so I would experiment witht that approach :).

Tnx everyone!

I figured out you make a terrain in with terragen, then save it in lwo file and convert it into mb.