How to create a realistic landscape

ColMatrix

Hello,

Thanks for taking the time to help.

I'm trying to create a landscape similar to the image below. The camera starts roughly 250 meters above the ground, moves toward a wind turbine, then descends vertically to ground level before entering the turbine.

 

I'm using 3ds Max 2027 with Arnold for rendering.

As a reference, I used a similar aerial image and generated a height map from it.

I have access to Forest Pack, but for this project it feels excessive and inefficient at this scale. The environment mainly consists of trees, with grass only needed during the vertical descent near the turbine base and surrounding fields.

Unfortunately, time is running short, and my current results look terrible. I've experimented with composite nodes and procedural noises (Smoke, Cells, etc.) to break up texture tiling. Textures come from Substance.

At this point, I'm happy to simplify the scene and move closer to the look of the first reference image if that makes the workflow easier and faster.

Any advice, guidance, or workflow suggestions would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks in advance!

Noren

Can you show what you've got so far? Is the bottom image a viewport screenshot or a render?

Forest Pack is "just" a scattering tool. You can use basically any geometry and proxies with it (I'd assume that includes Arnold stand-ins), use various manners of area distribution with variation as well as manual placement, you have a camera dependet LOD and lightweight viewport representation. Depending on how short "time is running short" actually is and if you aren't totally unfamiliar with it, I'd say it would be pretty useful for something like this, at least if you want something in the visual fidelity and detail like your reference image.
The free included tree models aren't too great, though, but from a distance it might work. But like said, you can source models from pretty much anywhere. Too steep an angle might also be a problem for the included billboards, in case you want to make use of those, but that's more something for the far distance anyway.

For procedurals with a nice organic look out of the box, the OSL noises (e.g. Uber Noise, but there are others) are pretty handy, e.g. if you want to break up two maps. Some of them can get a bit crash happy, especially in more nested materials, which can also add significant render time, but if you just want to use a noise as a mask for blending, it should be fine. Of course you can also use some (nested) standard noises.

 Also some UVW randomization, but for fields, you want some directionality and would have to be able to limit that to 180 degree increments, which also limits the usefulness.

Alternatively, you can just randomize between various tiling variants of the same texture per tile (I assume there's an OSL or perhaps even Arnold map for that, too), but that would require to create those first.
The easiest solution might be to simply have big texures that cover a lot of area uniquely and only switch to close up ones were necessary. Also, ideally and closer to the camera, foliage will hide a lot of it.

What does the height map look like and what is it for? Overall landscape relief, per field / transition road to field, finer surface structure? The aerial image doesn't really seem to lend itself for any of that without a lot of work, unless perhaps inverted to get a rough sense of where fields and streets are.

ColMatrix

@Noren ,

thank you very much for assisting!

The last image above is a render using Arnold Skydome with a Physical Sky and is my actual progress. Unfortunately, I don't have the time to generate my own trees and vegetation, so I plan to use a couple of the Forest Pack tree assets instead. The camera will never be particularly close to the vegetation, and once it zooms in on the turbine, very little of the surrounding environment will remain visible. The level of fidelity shown in the reference image is my target, although I'm flexible about this as the project progresses.

I'm still quite new to Forest Pack, but I don't really need anything overly complex. Many of the internal Forest Pack nodes are not compatible with Arnold GPU—for example, Forest Color for color variation. At the moment I'm simply bypassing that node rather than trying to recreate its functionality with OSL.

The height map (attached) itself is also fairly flat, which is typical of much agricultural landscape. It's not especially dramatic terrain, but it does suit the wind farm environment well.

With the reference image as the primary visual target, what would be the best approach for creating fields that look like that without incurring the significant geometry overhead associated with Forest Pack grass clusters?

My initial thought is that, since the camera remains relatively distant, a texture-driven approach might be more efficient than scattering large amounts of geometry. I'm interested in understanding how you would typically achieve that level of realism while keeping the scene lightweight and Arnold GPU-friendly.

Thanks Noren!