Daniel Collins | Product and Immersive Design
Mountain Range Model
This lifelike mountain range is one of many virtual environments that are in high demand nowadays, with them being used in architectural renders, video games, and films. Making convincing terrain, however, is a tight needle to thread, because our brains will instantly notice any detail that's out of place, which can easily break a viewer's immersion.
To create realistic terrain by hand would be wildly time-consuming, especially on a large scale, so to create these environments, we use automated systems to create the terrain along with generative textures that are determined by the conditions of the terrain they're placed on, such as the rock layer being visible on a steep surface where snow couldn't rest.
Landscape and Foliage
Modelling an entire landscape by hand would be a gruelling task that takes far longer than most businesses can afford.
To combat this, we wrote a small program in Unreal Engine that takes two gradient maps and uses them to generate the topography of the 3D model's landscape.
To texture the landscape, we take the the steepness and altitude of every part of the surface and use it to determine the overlaying texture, such as a rocky surface in places where the snow couldn't cover.
Finally, the foliage was scattered across the map while varying their heights by ±10% to keep them from appearing too uniform.
Post Processing and Atmospherics
Lighting and atmospherics are arguably more important than the physical models of a virtual environment, due to our brains being hardwired to notice small inconsistencies with lighting and shadows in order to spot predators in the wild.
So creating immersive atmospherics requires balance and restraint, because it's easy to exaggerate the visual effects by a small amount; breaking viewer's immersion, but using too little can also alert viewers that something's wrong, even if they can't pinpoint why.
A number of post-processing effects were used to create the visual style for this environment. The first was a simple vignette effect, which helped soften the edges of the screen, which prevents the image from looking too flat.
A heavy volumetric fog was also placed over the entire map, as this created beams of light known as cathode rays that scatter naturally across the map as they interact with the shape of the landscape.
Next was the subtle use of chromatic aberration, as this gave the image more depth without effecting video quality.
Finally, was the use of lens flairs, which is a subtle visual detail that effects cameras that are subjected to bright lights such as the sun.