Island scene_August

To make the island I started off by creating a displacement map. With a displacement map you apply a solid white colour on a black background in which 3ds max will read the white to where the extrusion will be, grey is a slight extrusion and black is no extrusion. On 3ds max i chose the displace modifier and imported the displacement map i made earlier on Photoshop. This had created the basic island. The material of the rocks is a bump map scaled down to resemble pebbles. The water is simply a plane with a flat mirror material applied to the noise modifier. By turning on the animation consol and changing the figures on the noise modifier I was able to create an animated water scene.

To create the sky I simply applied a sky image to the environment but found this did not look realistic. To overcome this I created a semi-sphere to act as my atmosphere. To create the clouds i applied a sky blue background to the inside of the sphere and then by using tiling and blur on the material editor i was able to create a white recurring pattern which resembled the clouds. After doing this i noticed that the tiling system seemed to have made the wireframe of the sphere appear in my atmosphere, after many attempts of trying to get rid of this wireframe i had to give up as a result of time and skill constraint. To make the white haze on the horizon i had duplicated the sphere and co-ordinated the tiling system to the bottom of the system.

The lighting system is made up of several different lights. The first is simply sunlight, this was added to give off a yellow light to resemble real summer light. The other spot light is on the horizon, I had applied a ray and glow to make it look like the sun.

At this point i felt that the island scene had finished but also felt that it had looked to of been missing a few elements. TAs a result i had added a silhouette of a man fishing. To create this I had imported a personal picture of a man fishing into Photoshop created a path around the fisherman. This path was then exported into adobe Illustrator, the purpose of this was to export the path of the man as a dwg file in which 3ds max is able to read. 3ds max reads this file as a spline in which i was able to extrude the spline and place the fisherman on the horizon and black him out. I did this because i felt that creating a full 3d model of a man fishing would consume too much time.

To create the boats I had first created a box and then started polygon editing. Once I created the outside shape I had used Boolean to create the hollow shell of a boat. To create the wood effect I had downloaded an image of a fence from Google images and applied the map to the boat, by using the map editor I was able to scale down and rotate the image to create the real wood effect.

As in all my scenes creating the camera is only a one step process. I feel the quickest way is to use the perspective viewport to move around and find where I think the camera should be placed. I find that moving a camera round can be a very tedious process. Once I am happy with the view from the prospective viewport I then go to create and then choose create camera from viewpoint. By doing this I feel that I am able to save valuable time.