Greenwater Landscape 02

Thanks my friend, once you have a place to start, you fly your camera over the image at the left, pausing to take note of interesting formations and compositions, just like you were hiking around! then trying dozens of textures and atmospheres, it’s mad scientist time, I tell you!!!

It gets pretty weird when you paint on the land with a brush and it crumbles and erodes, or, builds up higher and makes plateaus or peaks, if I do it for too long, I start to feel really very large… !

Many thanks, been a while since I played with rocks, mountains and sky, and anyone can sit and try out flat images as terrains all day!

The real fun is when I become a tiny tourist with a tiny camera and start hiking around the landscape taking snapshots! In this world I can fly too!

It gets even better, you can paint right on the landscape with a brush and raise it up, also carve it down, throw small rocks onto it, turn it inside out, dig a hole, like it was made of goo!

Thanks Keith, I kept coming to the edges of this one until I made a 4square of it, then another for good measure, then pushing them together seemed logical. In fact one of the samples looks like an Aztec arena with tiers, hmmm…...

Thanks Viv, this is a 3D landscape I can move around in and look at different sides of, and move the sun and even change the sky, it’s so much fun!!

Especially if you consider the scale, I’m thinking that wall is maybe 60 feet high or more.

Thanks so much, it’s so surreal to create a little world and then go hiking on it, while you change the weather and move the sun around!

Glad you’re inspired! You just gave me an idea, on the terrain model above, I could put a little red circle and an arrow, indicating the place and direction of the view. I started doint these in Bryce, all the first things I uploaded were the best of those, but Vue does them better, enables me to increase the resolution of the rocks for a more crumbly texture, but Bryce has better alien skies.

In either Bryce or Vue, you can choose to render with an alpha channel, that gives you a separate rendering that can be loaded into Photoshop and (several steps later) masks out the sky. Then you can create a rendering in Bryce that is only sky, load that into Photoshop and composite them. the trick is to make sure the light is coming from the same direction in each. Complicated, but yes, it can be done.

Here is an example of alpha rendering, except the sky came straight from the Hubble telescope:

Alpha masks can capture every detail and leaf far better than doing it manually in Photoshop, although that’s an alternative.

Thank you again, your enthusiasm is catching!!

Mostly it’s finding the right box to check, and deleting the ground plane if it’s in the way. I’d have to experiment with Gimp and alpha planes before I swore it would accomodate you.

So far no rain, they’re saying maybe lots less tornados this spring and longer summer pattern. Weather getting weirder, globe getting warmer?

yup… and this is a new one for me, storms from the south east, Florida, all broken into pieces, finally rained this morning.

That’s what I’m saying! And looks like it fizzled here, probably soaked St Louis, sun’s out and the grass grew 2 inches!

Hi Dave, I acquired 3 different fractal programs so I could make mountains from them, haven’t even touched them, instead have collaborated with several artists here with likely looking works, what fun! Hope all is well with you!