Environment

Me and James Tomkins have been working on the environment for our scene. Our environment is based around the Lijiang River and gumdrop mountains. These mountains are very large with sudden drops which give a very unique landscape. Below is an image of the Lijiang River with the gumdrop mountains.

James created a base mesh in ZBrush and then gave it to me to adjust and texture. This is the base mesh James gave me:

There were a few things that needed changing. The first was that one mountain was a little too big. We needed quite a large bank for some of the action to take place but this bank needed to be amongst the mountains so that it still has the dramatic backdrop. Lastly, there had to be one main mountain that I could add stairs to and have a flat top so that it could act as a finish line and end goal for the race. 

I was having trouble moving the environment around and then I realised that it was made of 655360 polygons. This was most likely because it had been modelled in ZBrush. I decided to make the adjustments to the landscape first and then figure out a way to reduce the poly count. 

I exported it into Mudbox and made the necessary change to the base mesh and this was the mesh.

I added the stairs so that I knew what angle the mountain edge had to be at to be usable. To reduce the poly count, I deleted the bottom of the mesh which saved many polys. I gave it back to James because in ZBrush he was able to reduce the poly count without it effecting the shape of the mesh. This took it down to just 400 faces but it meant that the mesh was made of triangles rather than squares. This was not such a problem as we were not going to move the environment.

I need to model the pavilion for the top of the flat mountain and it is now ready for texturing.