Creating Terrain

As part of my scene the pod race will take part in the desert and mountains of Naboo so for this to happen I will need to create some terrain for the race to happen within.


I decided to do some research and have combined several differant things I learnt from various tutorials and some youtube videos to create the following steps. 


Firstly you have to draw out a large plane or to the scale you require.

Then in the parameters increase the amount of segments in this case because of the size of the plane I have gone for 400 x 400 unfortunately this gives 160,000 segments which is not ideal but further experimentation with this technique will hopefully help me get this figure down in the final film.

The next step is to apply the displace modifier to the plane this is what will do the magic later on.

Next step out of 3Dmax and head for your browser & google to search for height maps, once this is done you will see many types of terrain in a form not dissimilar to an X-ray.

After this you then look for the image section of the displace tool bar and where it says none click there and then select and add the image you have just acquired. 

 Once you have imported the next stage is to increace the strength and as you increase it as if by magic your terrain starts to rise from the plane.

Below is the final terrain image its at this point that you can see why I added so many segments at the beginning ultimately the more segments you have the more detailed your terrain is but that may come at a performance cost later on.
Once this is complete you can apply a texture and its done.