Hi, I'd like to share some stuff I did as hobby during the vacation. I'm working on improving the pipeline so all comments are more than welcome!
This is in Lapland, Finland.
I work as a one person company on my free time and I'm about to receive some refinery visuals projects this spring. As the projects incorporate big land areas, I needed a solution to model the existing environments automatically.
For that, our survey agency has a .SHP database of the country, including vector from cliffs, swamps, different forest types, roads and their classification.
- In Infraworks I made style rules for the different roads and land areas, then connected to the WFS service to get the shapefiles. I export the model with "merge by material" option. This way I have the generation areas to work with in 3dsmax.
- In 3dsmax, I use landscape shaders for the different area types as materials that replace the Infraworks placeholder textures. For example, the shader generates rock formations by slope and altitude ranges.
- For vegetation, I use the same areas to drive ItooSoft Forest Pack forests, which I'm making presets for different landscapes: swamp, conifer forest etc.
Anyhow here is a test render of approx. 1sq kilometer area through the pipeline. At the moment this takes approx. 1 hour to setup this kind of 3dsmax scene from any given area in Finland. I'm working on the shaders and forest presets to add realism, this is the first iteration and I took a new engine for a spin (Corona). I still need to learn max scripting to make the max part faster also (automatical material replacements to the infraworks styles, so I don't have to click all the 5 of them).
If there is discussion I will try and grab screenshots of the Infraworks bit to share with you and also improve the output a bit.
