Hi all

[kimey]

Thought I'd drop by and say hello to everyone as i'm new here. I've posted a few pics in my album - gives you a feel of some of my work.

cheers

[jtougas]

wow those are excellent !! Welcome to the Guild

[jbgibson]

Wow, you do nice work. I particularly like the forest texture on the kahima 3d-rendering. Well, and the cityscapes, and the varied world maps - you have plenty to offer; I'm glad you joined!

[kimey]

Thanks. The Kohima map isn't a texture, it's thousands of individual trees although the placement of them is driven but a colour map which IS a texture. The map is rendered in VNS3. http://3dnature.com/vns3.html

The cityscapes are done with PShop brushes. Only the space craft isn't a brush.

[Gidde]

Welcome to the Guild!

[Ascension]

I like that cityscape matte-painting technique...repeated brush of the buildings. I hate drawing buildings but this seems like a good way to go. The terrains are really cool.

[Redrobes]

Wow thats some interesting software listed. Im part of me-dem which is a loose collection of a small number of mad folk trying to make middle earth as a DEM in very high res. Its being driven off of global mapper and your the first non me-demmer I have seen here mention it. Its also using leveller. ImageSynth has been bounded about a few times on here and CityEngine sounds interesting but I have not even heard of VNS3.

I like new ideas and people with fresh stuff so looking forward to seeing your stuff. I'll start with your album in a mo.

Welcome BTW.

Edit -- oh yes, very cool. Some of your concept art is a lot like Rodney Matthews which I greatly admire. And UK too - we have a members map where you can stick a pin into the board if you feel like narrowing it down a little. Thats a link in my sig or from the community menu at top.

[kimey]

Hi Red

Making a high res DEM of Middle Earth? Ambitious! I've thought of this myself a few times but never got around to doing it. I thought it might be possible to "paint" with real DEM data to achieve this. MicroDem is useful for opening DEM files and re-saving them or extracting data such as elevation extremes. It's a free piece of software. I'll put some links at the foot of this post.

VNS3 (Visual Nature Studio) is a great bit of software. I started by using WCS (World Construction Set) by the same company. VNS3 has a horrible learning curve but once you crack open that box there is SO much you can do with it. The company that develops it are very friendly, a sort of family atmosphere. They have a Yahoo group but it's not very active. There are so many different permutations when using the software. A few years ago, I did something in the program that made it crash. I emailed them an told them what I was doing at the time. Within hours a patch was emailed back for me to test. Now that's service!

CityEngine is expensive. It also has a horrible learning curve. I've not been using it very long. Everything in the program is run by a cga rule. This is a type of scripting. I recently built the city of Constantinople in CityEngine as a job. The buildings and street network in the "Walcheren" image in my album was created in CityEngine and rendered in VNS3. You can also import OSM (Open Street Map) data into CityEngine.

You might want to check out Blackart. Another bit of free software. It enables you create height maps or DEMs by importing vector contours drawn in Illustrator. You then tag each contour with the relevant height. It then renders a height map based on the input data.

regards

MicroDem
http://www.usna.edu/Users/oceano/pgu...m/microdem.htm

VNS3
http://3dnature.com/vns3.html

Blackart
http://www.terrainmap.com/

Open Street Map
http://www.openstreetmap.org/

[kimey]

BTW. Globalmapper is an invaluable piece of kit. It's made my life so much easier.

[Steel General]

Welcome Aboard!