Environment Design

Today I created my first environment, not incuding the one my ship was set in.

Displacement Map
The first step in creating an environment was in Photoshop. I created a new document at 512x512 with 72 pixels/inch. That blank slate creates the base of what I am going to create. The first major step is to then fill the space in black, this will be the lowest points when the environment is put into 3D Max.
I select the brush tool and set the colour as a dark grey and start to brush on where you wan the next level/higher point in your environment. I then repeat the process each time choosing a lighter colour until I choose pure white to be the higest points in the environment and save the file as a jpeg. This is now your Displacement map.

3D Max: Displaceing An Environment

The next step in createing your environment is in 3D Max. I use standard primitives to create a place on which my displacement map will go on, but first I increase the number of length and width segments as this will increase its resolution. I set the segments to 100x100.
After creating the plane and changing the numebr of segments I go onto the modifier list and select displace. From the list of actions available, I click to add a bitmap image and select the jpeg I created in photoshop which is then applied to the plane. By increasing the strength of the displacement, the plane will begin to morph according to whta we did on the jpeg - the lighter sections of the image will rise up while the darker parts will remain low, this will turn into our basic environment.
I then changed the Blur level to smooth out the rough edges to my liking.

Texture Map
The environment looks a little dull at the moment so what we need to do now is add a skin to add colour to it.
We go back to our displacement map in photoshop and create a new save file, this new file will be our texture file. I then add a new layer and select the first colour I want to add, in my case I added a green to go along the "road". After placing the green colour I added noise to the colour and changed the the percentage until I was happy with what it looks like.
I then created another layer and repeated with grey colours to become the mountains and again added noise and changed the levels so they worked well together. After adding all the layers I saw fit, I saved the image as a new jpeg and named it Texture Map.

Adding The Skin
The final step is adding the new skin to the environment. To do that I press M to bring up the material screen, click on displace and click on bitmap. I select my jpeg and drag it onto the environment.