I was thinking something more massive... have like a huge island (that way you can avoid having to have super detailed trees) with massive balloons holding it up on big thick chains. You could put in mountains with waterfalls and everything it would be awesome!!


A

---

Technical Director - Framestore

Currently working on: Your Highness

IMDB

how about a whole flotilla of little islands like you have around one big 'mutha' island?
now that would be cool

---

Examples of bTraffic - a traffic animation tool for Maya
bFlocking - a tool for Maya 8.5+ to generate flocking and swarming behaviours
Jan/Feb Challenge 2007 Entry and W.I.P
May/Jun Challenge 2006 Entry and W.I.P
Mar/Apr Challenge 2006 Entry and W.I.P
Jan/Feb Challenge 2006 Entry and W.I.P
Nov/Dec Challenge 2005 Entry and W.I.P
Sep/Oct Challenge 2005 Entry and W.I.P
Jul/Aug Challenge 2005 Entry
www.flash-fx.net

Hey guys, cheers for the Ideas.

I'm going to enlarge the island a bit and have it held up by a massive metal airship, with the airship kind of "Victorian" looking with lots riviets, girders etc, (in a similar vain to the old bridges) to kind of offset the beauty of the jungle...

At least thats the plan!

I might (depending on scene size and computer limits) make more islands, with some half broken and in the sea etc

Should have an update tonight as I've been a bit busy of late (damm work getting in the way!!)

Well got some time to model, here goes, the airship isn't finished as of yet (there s only one cable that I intend to convrt to a chain).

But i've ben trying to get a nice looking ungle, which i've forund is quite hard!!

Any suggestions???

Attached Thumbnails

Little bit of an update, i've been trying out particles for creating the jungle, here it is at the moment. Need to ass texture files to emitt the particles and add more plants (and scale the existing ones).

Please ignore the tree in the middle of the ocean, its just the origional tree used for the instanced particles.

Attached Thumbnails

Good work Gster!

I really like the idea of a victorian type airship - it might be cool if it had a passenger compartment underneath. Finding the right angle is going to be tough, but maybe if you have several islands like you said, it might give you more a bit more leeway with the final composition. I think having some broken islands half in the sea would be cool too.

I imagine that this is real headache to sort out so props to you for sticking with it mate. This is going to be a great entry.

---

arran3D

arran3D blog

Awsome render! I would like to see a tutorial on your partical instancing palm trees.

Cheers Guys

It is a bit of a pain to get the right perp and the scale correct, you cant see it at the moment but the Island has a lagoon, that i'm thinking of having a waterfall runing into the see off the edge of the island.

I'm going to have to colour the island as at the moment it's all a "rock" shader that i'm going to use for the mountains, I want to add some lush plants etc either via displacement map or modeled plants, as well as sand on the edge and soil at the bottom of the island.

I've got to model a very low poly palm tree and then instance that instead (as the poly count per tree is approx 1000 faces as its a paint effect converted and reduced so with the amount of trees on the render you can guess its quite a few polys in the scene!)

I'll write down the method i used to create the instanced particles tonight, its really simple but took a bit of head scratching to get it going.

Cheers

nice additions with the trees
a waterfall coming over the edge would look very fantasy and cool - like something out of the ghibli studio films.

---

Examples of bTraffic - a traffic animation tool for Maya
bFlocking - a tool for Maya 8.5+ to generate flocking and swarming behaviours
Jan/Feb Challenge 2007 Entry and W.I.P
May/Jun Challenge 2006 Entry and W.I.P
Mar/Apr Challenge 2006 Entry and W.I.P
Jan/Feb Challenge 2006 Entry and W.I.P
Nov/Dec Challenge 2005 Entry and W.I.P
Sep/Oct Challenge 2005 Entry and W.I.P
Jul/Aug Challenge 2005 Entry
www.flash-fx.net

I would like to see a tutorial on the water fall in addition to the tree tutorial if you don't mind.

Cheers man, i really need to figure out how to do it, gonna have a play in a new scene file.

THX, sorry for the delay but here’s how I instanced the palm trees.

I created a particle emitter to emit from the surface of the island, I then changed the emitter to surface.

Then select the palm tree group and the particles and go particles ->Instancer , simple as that really. I’m working on creating various scales and rotations of the plants via a bit of MEL, to give a nice random look to them. (I’m also going to try out a switch shader to give some colour variations to the plants)

Oh with the trees I converted them form paint fx then reduced and quaded the trees as far as I could go without loosing too much detail

I’ve made a bit of progress with the jungle (by creating various different plants and instancing them too) the scene when I run the particle’s and get a nice covering of vegetation for the jungle goes to approx 7 million polys!!!!, I’ll post a pic tonight, its nothing special just wanted to see if my PC would be able to handle it, which it does manage to do!!

Cheers

Well a bit of an update at last, been having quite a few problems with rendering the instanced plants, one set added black spots over the render??? Took me ages to figure out what was going on.

Heres a render now i've got it working, i'm going to add more plant types and sort out the textures and the lighting, and then try to add a waterfall from the island into the sea.


Any crits or comments for improvement appreciated

Cheers

Attached Thumbnails

I like this idea a lot gster, but I am not sure if I quite understand how the water on the island is working. It kind of looks like a reflection of the sea. I think I understand what you are trying to do, but I think you need to move the island higher in the sky and show more of the underneath of the island. At the moment I think where the viewer is supposed to be is too close. Also, maybe it would work better if the water was concentrated in one place on the island, like a lake which runs off the edge.

Sorry if I am completely misreading this, mate.

---

arran3D

arran3D blog

Cheers Arran, It was a bad texture on the bottom of the island that reflected the sea and with the displacement map made it look like water!

I really just wanted to post a pic so far to show I havent given up.

I think this pic shows it better, (i've adjusted the mateial to make it more earth like) you can just see the lagoon in the middle of the island this is where the water fall will come from. (im thinking of changing the camera angle to show it better, as I will be adding more of them floating about with one "crashed into the sea.

Attached Thumbnails