Terrain

Additionally to the three main models of the assignment, I have created a bumpy terrain in accordance to my moodboard from my initial post. The snowy terrain of Hoth is fairly simple and repetitive, meaning it was fairly easy and quick to create a large terrain of a similar appearance. Taking a heightmap from somewhere in Antartica using a heightmap generation website (terrain.party, 2015) and using the displace tool resulted in a high detail, realistic terrain. The potential issue of using a website like this is that the resulting heightmap may be too bumpy or mountainous.

Below shows the heightmap displaced on a plane. The higher the number of segments, the more detail is applied. This is evident in the two screenshots below. It is however immediately obvious that the 1000 segments are very polygon intensive resulting in a total well over 100,000. While this will be static and arguably deserves a higher resolution as it covers the whole area of the scene, rendering speeds will be significantly affected.

Having experimented with segment amounts (made possible by the fact I could change between the primitive settings and the non destructive displacement modifier in the hierarchy), it seemed a lower number of segments had more benefits. Choosing around 150 resulted in a fair less detailed terrain. This did however seem to work well for what I am trying to achieve as the bumps are much more subtle and easier for animating vehicles traversing them.

To really see how the result looked, I textured the snow and added in the power generator. Using a noise procedural map on the bump channel of a white standard material created a good snow effect. A simple metal texture with a low level of glossiness worked well for the generator, though will likely be improved.

Good parts:

• Subtle snowy hills have been created without a massive number of polygons
• Flat parts of terrain will allow for easier animation of AT-AT walking on it
• Hills work well with power geneator model breaking up its repetitive structure 
• Snowy texture uses procedural bump map that can be scaled up without distortion  

Improvements:

• Terrain could appear potentially too simple
• Square shape may not work well with sphere shaped skydome