#017 GAD BA1 P2: iPhone Game - Envrioment

So far I've got a general concept of what I want to create for my game, so now I need to delve deeper into the more specifics of the game. I spent a few hours watching tutorials on how to create mountain scenery in 3DS Max, comparing the different styles and identifying which one will work best for me. A lot of them suggest using contour lines from a real life map as a basis, which for learning purposes would not be so bad, however I wanted to create my scene from scratch so the few tutorials I found that used the paint deformation push/pull tool on a plane field were more suitable to my needs.

So I set about just doing a bit of a test, creating a small lake with steep mountains/hills on one side and a smooth hilly side on the other. It was only a small scale basic test to see how much or how little detail I could put in to it just by using one tool. Below is my first attempt.

After that I made a render from the top view so I could add some texture to the poly. Once in photoshop I used a soft brush tool to go around the area that would be the lake, then traced around the edges in a slightly bigger brush in a brown for the shore line. After that I traced the shore line with a green brush and painted the rest of the map green. For the last part I used a white brush at 50% opacity on the highest points of the mountains to give the effect of snowy peaks. Below is the texture:

I went back into 3DS Max and used the material editor to add the material texture to the transformed plane, here was the result:

My next step will be to create an environment that meets the requirement of the game, including a starting/home point and a number of locations were the enemy settlements will be.