Simply Maya – 3D Exterior Set Design – Fantasy Landscape

Creating a Fantasy Landscape is a tutorial that contains a lot of NURBS modeling so you will learn how to work with isoparms, hulls, CV’s, lofting surfaces and Maya’s curve tools. This is a fast way to generate a lot of geometry in a scene which is then converted to polygons for adding details
and refining the models.

We’ll create mountain terrain, windmills, mushroom shaped houses, clouds and rope bridges, all these techniques are important when modeling fantasy or realistic exteriors in Maya. You’ll see how the sculpt geometry tool can be used to sculpt ground based terrain and work with the split poly tool to cut out irregular shapes in landscape modeling.

The project continues with texturing where you’ll lay out UV’s for the environment and you’ll get some good tips and tricks on how to fix some of the common problems that might occur during the UV mapping process. We’ll then bring it into Photoshop for texture painting rock, wood and many other things during which you’ll get some good practice at using smudge tools and blending colors. As well we’ll create bump maps using procedural textures and to get some color variation in our final scene we will work with ramp textures.

Finally we’ll create a complete sky environment with clouds and look at how to add your own custom background images in Maya and render with depth of field to add another dimension to our final result. This environment can further be used to place your own animated characters in.