On 31-7-2013 19:42, Tom A. wrote:
> Beautiful.  I am such a hack in comparison....
>
> May I ask some technical questions?

Of course.

>
> The mountains in the distance (love the layers) -- How did you do that?  It
> doesn't look like a simple heightfield; maybe a hightfield on another? (or a
> heightfield turned sideways towards the viewer?)

The mountains consist of one single height_field made in GeoControl. It 
is mirrored and copied a number of times to fill the panorama. The 
layers are produced by a texture using a slope/altitude pattern.

>
> The trees (or vegitation) on the mountain foothills -- they look more 3d than
> textured on it.  Did you loop a trace() and place green objects there?  What
> sort of objects?

The trees are one single POV-Tree object exported as mesh{}. There are 
200,000 of them from the far background to the middle foreground. They 
are traced on the combined heigh_fields and randomly rotated, scaled, 
and textured to different green hues. Obviously, I first saved a file 
with trace positions. You only have to do that once as it takes some 
time to calculate; then you only need to include the file and read the 
locations which is very fast.

>
> Similar question about the far trees across the misty valley -- how detailed did
> you make them to have them come out looking like that?  (Obviously, you don't
> need to model them to the leaf level at this distance).

Same tree, one single bunch of trees over the whole image ;-) As they 
are instanced from one single mesh there is very little memory needed.

>
> And the close grass -- I've tried to make it with a bunch of triangles.  They
> were all the same color, though.  How do you get all the colors?  You don't
> model them individually, do you?

Individual grass patches are originally Poser props. There are eight of 
them, textured and uv-mapped and exported as mesh2. Using the same 
technique as for the trees, they are randomly chosen, rotated, scaled on 
the foreground heigh_field. The latter has a basic slope pattern texture 
to put some green under and between the grass patches.

Thomas

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