For this piece I decided to try out something a bit more exciting – VR! When I started out I felt like this would be a relatively simple task given the fact that I have several asset packs that I have previously made that would greatly speed up this process.
These were made by using World Machine – where I layered and blended different noises and fractal functions to create them. Once a single function was created 3 different randomized outputs were made.
Once I had enough height maps I decided to go into Zbrush where I hand placed them over a subdivided plane as alphas – this gave me great speed, variation and flexibility when making the terrain
Next the scene was moved to Keyshot where the assets were rendered in various materials.
I them placed the camera in the center and proceeded to render the scene from different angles – Keyshot does not support panoramic renders so the process was quite painful…
Finally it was time to piece together the scene in Photoshop – to do this I created 3D spherical panorama where I could directly paint inside the sphere and edit the unwrapped texture directly.
Here is the final panoramic texture – in the end I used some photograph to add some texture variations to the soil and mountains as well as details like the fumes and sea ice.
The final result can be viewed here – in the final project Marmoset Toolbag was used to add effects like lens flare, bloom and color correction to the scene (these are not however visible in the Marmoset Viewer link)
https://www.artstation.com/artwork/OXVQ6
The End
