Write up for background, land and mountains.

For the background we chose Swedish/alpine looking scene due to the information collected about the engine and the type of dredger it would have been used in.

Firstly I created a box for the shoreline and the land, to do this I selected box from the create menu and dragged it out to the size I needed it and used the shape parameters to create segments within the box so it could be easily manipulated.

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I then selected the box and right clicked it and selected ‘convert to editable poly’ once it had been converted I went to the modify panel and selected vertex mode. I could then select separate vertices and move them around until I got the shape that I wanted for the land and shoreline.

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I then wanted to add a material to the box to make it look real and so that it will fit into the scene better, I chose a snow material for the box, here is the image I used,

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Because the camera will not pan very close to the land I did not need to create a fully detailed map of snow, but if I was going to I would have used a particle system to do this to make it look realistic.

To add the map I opened the material editor (M on the keyboard) and added the bitmap image of the snow to the bump map and the diffuse colour by selecting the map button and selecting bitmap, then selecting the image from the correct folder. I had to play around with the settings for the bump map to create the right looking effect for the snow, I then dragged the material onto the box.

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Once the map was added and rendered it looked stretched and out of proportion, so to correct this I added a UVW map modifier to the box. To do this I went to the modify tab and scrolled down to ‘UVW Map’ I then had to change the parameter settings, I selected the ‘Box’ checkbox then I changed the length with and height of the map and the U,V and W tile settings. Every time I changed the settings I rendered a shot of the scene until I was happy with how it looked.

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Once the land was created I moved onto making the mountains, the background scenery. For the mountains I used cones from the create shapes tab and under standard primitives. I then clicked and dragged the cone out onto the scene to the size I wanted it, I also made sure there was lots of segments so this could be easily edited once converted to an editable poly.

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I then right clicked the object and selected ‘convert to editable poly’, then I selected the vertices mode and used the move tool to move the vertices around to get the mountain to the shape I wanted.

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I then had to chose a map texture for the mountains to make them look realistic, here are the 3 maps I narrowed the choice down to and discussed with my group.

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We decided on the snow covered one after trying all 3 samples, I added this map to the map editor as the diffuse colour and the bump map.

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The map didn’t look natural on the mountains so I added a UVW map form the modifier list, i played around with the settings and the parameters, i kept rendering the shots until i was happy with what i had.

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Here is a rendered shot of the mountains.

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