3D Mountain in 3ds Max
In this 3ds Max tutorial we’re going to create a simple 3d mountain. The mountain geometry will be created from a simple plane with the displace modifier and it will be textured with a combination of procedural maps. The image will be finalized by strong sidelight and some volumetric clouds. I’m using 3ds Max 2011 but many older versions should work just as well.
Step 1 Mental Ray Renderer
We’re going to render the mountain with the Mental Ray. By default 3ds Max uses the Scanline renderer so we have to change that. Change the renderer to the Mental Ray ( ).
Step 2 3D Mountain Geometry
Create a Plane ( ) in the top viewport . Modify the Plane ( ) according to the following parameters :
- Length: 200
- Width: 200
- length Segs: 200
- Width Segs: 200
( )
Step 3 Mountains with the Displace Modifier
Add Displace modifier to the Plane ( ) and apply the following parameters:
- Displacement
- Strength: 100
- Image
- Map: Gradient Ramp
Open Material Editor ( ). Drag and drop the Gradient Ramp map from the Displace modifier into a material slot in Material Editor and select ‘instance’ when asked. Apply the following parameters to the Gradient Ramp map:
- Double click on the Flag #1 and change the color to white
- Double click on the Flag #3 and change the color to black
- Gradient Type: Radial
- Noise: Amount: 0,3
- Noise: Size: 6
- Noise: Turbulence
- Noise: Levels: 10
Finally go to the ‘Output’ section, click ‘Enable Color Map’ and adjust the color map according to the picture below. ( )
Tip: To adjust the small details of the mountain you can change the ‘ Phase’ in the Noise settings.
Step 4 Mountain Material
We’re going to create a snowcapped mountain with snow also at the base. The material will be created from scratch and it will use only procedural maps found in 3ds Max. We’ll utilize Gradient Ramp diffuse map to create color variations and Composite bump map to create lots of small scale details. So let’s select an empty material slot and create the material. You can just copy the settings from the picture or read the explanations below the picture.
- Select the mountain and click ‘Assign Material to Selection’
- Diffuse Color: Gradient Ramp
Flag #1: Color: RGB 180, 180, 180 Position: 0
Flag #2: Color: RGB 180, 180, 180 Position: 15
Flag #3: Color: RGB 100, 100, 100 Position: 22
Flag #4: Color: RGB 100, 100, 100 Position: 39
Flag #5: Color: RGB 180, 180, 180 Position: 49
Flag #6: Color: RGB 180, 180, 180 Position: 100
( )
Gradient Type: Radial
Noise Amount: 0,1
Noise Type: Turbulence
Noise Size: 1
Noise Levels: 10
( )
- Bump: Composite ( )
- Add Smoke map to the first layer of the Composite Map ( )
Size: 5
# Iterations: 20
- Add second layer to the Composite map. Change the blending mode to Addition and Opacity to 70. Add Speckle map to the second layer ( )
Size: 4
Color #1: white
Color #2: black
- Add third layer to the Composite map. Change the blending mode to Addition and Opacity to 60. Add Speckle map to the third layer ( )
Size: 0,003
Color #1: white
Color #2: black
( )
Make a test render to see how the 3d mountain looks like with the diffuse and bump maps. At the moment there are several problems with the rendered image:
- The mountain looks really boring and flat
- Sampling quality isn’t high enough for the small scale details
- There are some unnaturally sharp edges in the outline of the mountain
Next we’re going to fix these issues.
Tip. If you’d like to create vegetation to the base of the mountain you could change the color values of Flags 5 and 6 ( in the Gradient Ramp map) to green.
Step 5 The Lighting
Soon we’re going to create more serious renders so let’s create a camera. Create a Target camera ( ) in the top viewport and place it according to picture below. Right-click on the Perspective view and press C in the keyboard to change it to the Camera view.
We rely heavily on the bump map so we desperately need more interesting illumination for the mountain. Create ‘mr Area Spot’ ( ) in the top viewport, place it according to picture below, and apply the following settings to it.
- General Parameters
- Shadows: ON
- Shadows: Ray Traced Shadows
- Intensity/Color/Attenuation
- Multiplier: 2,5
- Color: RGB 255, 248, 221
- ( )
- Spotlight Parameters
- Hotspot/Beam: 15,2
- Falloff/Field: 17,2
- ( )
- Area Light Parameters
- Type: Disc
- Radius: 250
- ( )
Render your mountain to see the effect of the Mental Ray area spotlight.
Now the left side of the mountain is completely black and it fades into the background. Let’s fix that by adding a fill light. Create ‘Omni’ light and place it to the left side of the mountain and apply the following setting to it:
- Intensity/Color/Attenuation
- Multiplier: 0,7
Render a test image to see the effect of the fill light. Move the Omni light if necessary.
Compare this to the render in step 4 to understand the importance of lighting.
Step 6 More Polished Look
Next we’re going to increase the quality of the mountain geometry and adjust the sampling settings to get more polished render. Go to the render setup and increase antialiasing quality by increasing Mental Ray’s sampling values ( ):
- Samples per pixel
- Minimum: 4
- Maximum: 64
- Filter
- Type: Mitchell ( )
Select the mountain, go to the modify panel, and add TurboSmooth modifier to smooth out the hard edges of the model. Render your mountain to see the effect of these adjustments.
Step 7 Volumetric Clouds Around the Mountain
As a final thing we’re going to add some clouds around the mountain to create more depth and better sense of scale. Create four sphere gizmos ( ) in the top viewport. Apply the following settings to the gizmos:
- SphereGizmo001
- Radius: 61
- Hemisphere: YES
- SphereGizmo002
- Radius: 47
- Hemisphere: YES
- SphereGizmo003
- Radius: 79
- Hemisphere: YES
- SphereGizmo004
- Radius: 50
- Hemisphere: YES
Place the gizmos according to the picture below. SphereGizmo001 is on the left and SphereGizmo004 is on the right.
Let’s go to the atmosphere settings ( ) to add some clouds:
- Click ‘Add…’ , select ‘Volume Fog’, and click OK.
- Gizmos:
- Click ‘Pick Gizmo’ and click on the SphereGizmo001. Repeat for all sphere gizmos.
- Increase ‘Soften Gizmo Edges’ to 1.
- Volume:
- Color: RGB 255, 248, 221 ( )
- Max Steps: 200 ( )
- Noise:
- Type: Turbulence
- Size: 40
Just hit render and your 3d mountain image is complete. I made some small adjustments in Photoshop:
- Smart Sharpen Filter
- Amount: 40%
- Radius: 0,5 pixels
- Contrast
- +25
I hope you enjoyed it! I’d love to hear how the tutorial is working for you!
Click to share if you like it!
95 Responses to “3D Mountain in 3ds Max”
Newer Comments » Newer Comments »Leave a Reply
3ds Max Tutorials Elsewhere
My Graphic River Portfolio!
-
Contribute!
If you are a talented artist and have ideas to share, we welcome you to be a guest author! Click here to find out more!
-
3ds Max Tutorials
Polygon Blog is devoted to unique 3ds Max tutorials. All tutorials on this site are about 3ds Max. Furthermore, these tutorials don't require any plugins. They are doable with just 3d Max. If you have a good idea for a new 3d Studio Max tutorial, please let us know!
I got lost in step 3. (Compact Material Editor) I put in all the settings, but the result still looked like a plane. I couldn’t apply the material either. (I’m a beginner)
I got your email. I’m glad to hear it worked. I made some small adjustments to the tutorial to make it easier to understand.
The same happened to me (still looking like a plane at step 3), I don’t know if you made the same mistake, but in my case, I created the plane on the front view port instead of the top one…
hope it helps!
Hey,
I just recently discovered your blog and I must say it’s one of the most refreshing ones around with a lot of interesting stuff so far.
Hoping to see more in the future.
Keep up the good work!
I’ll try to publish something new every week. Thank you for your encouraging words!
You’re more than welcome!
This site is crazy man. Crazy awesome!!!!!!!
Hi polygonblog
I’d like to say thanks to you, your tutorials are very useful for me and beginner with 3dmax.
Wish you all the best things!
Looking forward to see your new tutorials!
agree, this blog is awesome.Just bookmarked it :p
Bookmarked, looking forward to seeing what’s next!
COOL ! Bookmarked !
Thank you for this blog
I like your last 3 tutorials.
Your blog is some of the good ones.
Great Tutorial, Just Newbie error on my part… please keep them coming.
Nice work! I was wondering, can this “mountain” be placed in a scene where it sees as a far far away object? like if we saw something big in a far distance? And how we combine it with our “place/environment” scene, is it we have to make the “mountain” so big or what? Or is it when we saw a mountain in the animation movie its just an image?
It could be a huge geometric object in the distance, but probably better solution would be to have just a picture of a mountain in the background.
A mountain of thanks for your tutorial
The time involved in all the screen captures/cropping, and then organizing it all into a tutorial must be immense.
Thanks for the mountain tutorial, I wanted to try extended matte paintings in Nuke and a few camera mapped mountains will really help me out. Great job.
Yes, it takes a lot of time to create tutorials. Hopefully designers find them helpful.
Hi, for a fly through mountains kind of animation, would you suggest building them this way? or use a simple plane with a displacement modifier? Wonder how it can be lighted and textured though
great modeling
Thanks for the tutorial! it’s so cool! <3
Nice tutorial
great level of detail…
Very nice ! Thanks for this good tutorial
Amazing site, amazing tutorials, and beautiful logo! haha I love your website, by the ways, i’m a beginner to 3ds max, got an good learning sugestions? and did you render your logo in ambient oculsion?
Never before made procedural mountain of any sort in max. Cool tutorial! You have a good grasp in max. Very effective tutorial, not hard to follow. The only thing is to below max2011 (and 2010 too, I guess) users – composite material works in little bit different way than described here which is for max2011. I use max2008. One workaround could be using mix maps in composite material slots on older versions. Something like that. But even roughly following this tutorial gives very interesting results, at least for me it worked.
Thanks for your insightful feedback! You are right about the composite material, it sure is different in older versions. If I remember correctly, in 3ds Max 2008 there is no blending modes nor opacity control at all. However, you can still combine maps, like Kashak mentioned, by using Mix maps. You can also combine several Mix maps inside a Composite map by varying their ‘Output Amount’ values.
Nice tutorial, Good information.Thank you.
http://www.bilder-hochladen.net/files/f0uh-1-jpg.html
great man..easy to understand…..good detail levels.,,keep it up !!
Thanks for the tutorial! it’s so cool!
Thanks a lot from Perú!!!!!!!!!!
Dude you,re a beast! how did you find out how to do all this stuff on 3ds max?!
great tutorial…
this is excelent this tutorial just saved my grade in my 3d animation class. CHEERS!!
awesome, thanks so much for this tutorial
Doing a spoof of the Paramount Open and this saved me a ton of time. Pretty good looking results. I will try to post once I’m done.
Wonderfull thank you guy!
that’s great!
This is really cool. A very hands-on and easy to follow tutorial that actually brings some new tools to the table for me. I am a student who is getting into game development and anything I can learn that yields these types of results in a relatively short amount of time adds to my arsenal of techniques. Thanks!
I will try to refer as many of my fellow students to your site for your tuts.
Thank you very much for this tutorial. I have a question dealing with the rendering. I have added to the scenery two texts which are moving separately alongside the timeline (300 frames). It turns out that the use of the Mental Ray increases dramaticaly the rendering time which amounts to 55 hours.
I have used your settings i.e.:
Mental Ray’s sampling values :
* Samples per pixel
o Minimum: 4
o Maximum: 64
* Filter
o Type: Mitchell
Could you be so kind as to let me know if there is a method to reduce this rendering duration. My computer as an AMD Athlon 64 X2 4600+ Dual core processor with 4 GBytes RAM. I have the Windows 7 32 bits operating system.
Thank you very much for your assistance
I suggest you use the following sampling values:
Samples per pixel
- Minimum: 1
- Maximum: 16
Filter
- Type: Box
This should speed up the rendering. Additionally, I suggest you save the rendered pictures as image files instead of a video file. This allows you to render the whole thing in many parts (for example little every night). Images are then combined into a video file in Video Post in 3ds Max or in some video editing software.
amazing tutorial, very well explained and detailed. thanks
Thank you for your answer giving alternate settings to speed up the rendering. They effectively have enabled me to perform the whole process in only 1 night. I am not aware of the Video Post feature which is not very clearly explained in the 3dsMax documentation. Is there any benefit to render the pictures as image files instead of movie files since the use of a video editing software makes it also possible to assemble several movies into a single one (I am currently editing my movies in Adobe Premiere)?
Incidentally are you aware of a good tutorial related to Video Post available on the net?
Thank you again.
Nice to hear you managed to render the whole thing. The real benefit of saving as picture files is the possibility to stop and continue rendering process and the possibility to render with several computers. Additionally some image file formats can store some extra information ( alpha, depth ) that might be useful in post processing.
I don’t know any viseo post tutorials. If you use viseo editing software I guess you might not need video post.
Great tutorial, as always
I have 1 comment, i think 100 for the displacement is not enough, i used 350 for it to look more like a mountain, not a hill.
Cheers, keep them coming
Thanks!! Your tutorials are great, and have really helped me improve my skills in 3D. If possible, I’d request that you please publish something on The Human Head/Body Modeling and Lighting for vehicles… THANKS.
Very nice and superb tutorials
face these tutorials is exelentes, even though I can understand in English, by the way I am Brazilian and here are the tutorials on very old versions of 3ds Max, I always update the versions with my company and it is difficult to follow with older versions, and how do you use the same version as I always do my tutorials to the letter, congratulations on excellent blog, I hope you post more tutorials always a big hug Bill Gates … Luke joke
This tutorial is great! and is not that difficult to understand.
Looking forward to seeing more of this from Uruguay!
I cant find the mountain gradient ramp for the displacement map.. help? Its not under sceneassets in max2010 when i look for it, or anywhere else.. any suggestions?
thanks
nevermind, found it
thanks anyways!
I am just starting to learn 3ds max, and i must say that the tutorials you have on this are amazing, and easy to fallow, i have done the ocean one and volumetric light, i am going to do this one next.
I might try and make this one except some how change it to a mountain range.
I hope to see some more tutorials on here soon, i love how good quality they are.