Some terrain effects.

My final animation will need some open space for the action to take place in, so with the help of online tutorials, I have created an ocean and a mountain scene. The results are definitely impressive without much difficulty. The tutorial for the ocean is:

http://www.3dtotal.com/team/Tutorials_3/3dsmax_water_surface/water_surface_01.php
[Internet] [Accessed 03/03/2011]

and the tutorial for the mountains is:

http://www.3dtotal.com/team/Tutorials_2/terrain/terrain_01.php
[Internet] [Accessed 03/03/2011]

To start making the ocean, a plane was created and the 'Arch & Design' material was applied to it. In the material's parameters, 'ocean' was assigned to the special purpose maps section. Following the tutorial, various colours and values are altered. A gradient is then set within the existing material and more colours are altered.

It is a quick and simple process that takes about 10 minutes or so depending on your knowledge of the program (as long as you have the tutorial in front of you like I did). It looks very realistic as far as I am concerned and will be a good asset for my animation. The best part is, it automatically animates!

The quality of the render is low, but you get the idea. As for rendering time, well, I cooked myself some dinner, ate it and watched a little bit of TV while it crunched that code. Nice end result though.

Next, the mountains. A little bit trickier than the ocean, but not by much, and also produces a fantastic end result. A 550 x 500 (3dsmax's generic units) plane was created with 50 length and width segments. A 'smoke' map was then set the to diffuse with some adjustments made to values. A 'displace' modifier was assigned to the plane and the previously made smoke map was then added into the modifier.

Depending on whether your computer is up to it, increase the length and width segments of the plane to get a more complex look. A turbosmooth modifier was also added. Next, the colour needs to be sorted. This is done with a 'mix' material. Lots of values are then changed within this 'mix' and it gets a little confusing. Just stick to the tutorial for now and you will be fine. If you've seen the film Inception, you'll know how confusing it can be when I say its a material in a material in a material...we need to go deeper.

With the turbosmooth turned on only when rendering (to save your computer's poor CPU imploding) the result looks like this for now.

It even looks good close up.

Adding a sky image and some fog makes it look even nicer. Go to rendering > environment and set a sky image to the background map. For the fog, click 'add' in the 'atmosphere' parameter in the same window. Choose fog and change the colour.

And it is finished. However, I am more interested in a snowy scene than a desert for my animation, so all it takes is some colour adjustment to the mountains and fog, and there it is.