They say that the great ideas are two or three old ideas which are connected in a new way. Like, observing the lid on a pan with boiling water jump up and down, and then working in a black smithy could have been combined into a steam engine driven smelting hammer.
I’m making a film with Unreal Engine 4, and my idea derives from three parts: I want to tell little stories, I was playing with Blender to learn how to model, and a friend of mine wanted to show me an epise of an old British show called ‘Spitting Image’. It exploded in my head: maybe I could, as a solitary figure in my room, make a ‘puppet show’ with Unreal Engine.
Lucky I have no idea how much is, most likely, behind that. In any case, I’ve started to construct the ‘set’. First I’ll do the landscape. Then I’ll build a town in that landscape. I’ll make a lake, a river, and then individual buildings. And then, when the set is finished, I can start to make the ‘puppets’.
You old hands who have been doing this a while can remove the hands clasped to your faces now. The greatest human achievements are those where the achievers started out with a simple ‘Wouldn’t it be cool to…’ without having a single blasted clue about what they were getting themselves into.
Anyway, I thought I’d post a little record of my progress in here. I’ve been doing this for two days, and it’s simple stuff. First I made this landscape in World Machine.
It’s an 8x8 km landscape, and I’m modelling it on Scotland. It’s granite rock, grass, water and trees. Scotland is a funny country. It’s like Norway, but with more rain. Except the building materials differ from Norway. Sometimes you wonder if whatever force shaped the land ran out of building materials and just substituted anything that was nearby. Like, it ran out of granite, and then decided to just mash together what granite there was with a heap of iron oxide to make red rock. Or they decided that it would be fun if gravity was suspended for a bit in order to create weird crag shapes.
Anyway, I’m going for a more traditional look. No red rocks. No funny crags. I don’t know how to make those in world machine. Yet. Besides, those are probably best modelled separately in Blender.
This is the landscape as seen from the ground. And the next one is the landscape with a basic material on it. You might call it the first coat of paint. And there’s a problem with this landscape - my first indication that I might have bitten off more than I can chew.
How do you have several materials in a landscape? Rock is hard, and reflective. Light bounces straight off rock. I doesn’t penetrate the surface. But with grass and dirt it does. Grass is quite transparent. Lots of light shoots right through it. Dirt is a bit like human skin. There’s quite a bit of subsurface scattering going on. But with just one material on the land, there’s one setting for basic grass and dirt and rock. It all has the same reflectiveness, the same opaqueness.
This is the schematic for my landscape material. It’s the one seen in lots of youtube videos that attempt to inform thick-skulls like me about landscape generation.
Next up is to create the grass for my landscape. I’ll have to model that for myself. I’m a bit worried about the trees though. The sapling add-on in Blender ate up nearly all my memory, and I have 16 GB. And the tree I was working on wasn’t even particularly advanced. I just want to make a birch tree. This is the image I am striving for. When I put my camera down in one spot somewhere, I want to see something like this. Beautiful.
