Maya Tutorial: The Terrain Ground Plane

If you want to do some nature shots, most of the time you need to build a realistic terrain. In this tutorial I will show you how to achieve natural shapes in your ground. You will be using the sculpture tool and particles to deform the ground plane into a nice realistic natural look.

 

 

Maya Tutorial: The Terrain Ground Plane

 

STEP 1:

Create a primitive NURBS plane. Scale it to 100, 100, 100. In the channel box edit the inputs and set the Patches to 50, 50.

STEP 2:

Now with your plane selected in the Surface mode under the Edit NURBS menu choose Sculpt Geometry Tool. On the right side of the screen the options will pop up . Select the Push icon and set the radius of the brush onto 10. Go and push some parts of the plane downwards.

STEP 3:

Change the Max. displacement parameter to 2 and select the Pull icon. Now pull some more parts of the plane with your brush.

STEP 4:

Select the plane and in the Dynamics mode under the Soft/Rigid Bodies choose the Create Soft Body option box. Reset the tool and hit the create button.

STEP 5:

Select in the Outliner nurbsPlaneParticle node and in the Dynamics mode and choose Turbulence

STEP 6:

In the Outliner select the turbulenceField node and in the channel box change the Magnitude value to 1 and Attenuation to 0.

STEP 7:

Change the timeline of the scene to 100 frames. Now to achieve a more natural look in your ground plane you will hit the play button and the particles under the influence of the turbolence field will change the shape of your plane. Play the animation till you are satisfied with the shape and hit the stop button. In my case I chose to stop on the 33rd frame.

STEP 8:

Now if you hit the backwards button you will notice that the plane is back in the starting position. To get rid of the influence of the particles and keep the shape of the plane you will simply make a duplicate of the plane. Select the plane and under the edit menu choose Duplicate.

STEP 9

In the Outliner select the original NURBS Plane, turbulence field and particles nodes and hit delete or in menu press Edit>Delete. Make sure the copy of your ground plane is not selected.

 

Now you can put some nice texture on the ground plane and also use a bit of bump mapping to make the ground more realistic.

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