The one-week Environment #2 Finished!

[Statyk]

Well, I gave it a shot for today, but it didn't turn out like I thought it was going to :I It was still fun doing, though.

Spoiler below!

Here's some technicals if you're interested in figuring out what I did:

Spoiler below!

So the idea is pretty straightforward. Make an outdoor terrain, midday, with shadows casted as best as possible. HPL2 obvsiously doesn't like directional lighting with shadows, let alone a spotlight with a radius greater than 50... And that of course won't do. So here's the workflow...
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1) First, we need some land. Primitives won't do, no no. So we have to model it! Using an ocean shader in Maya, I used its displacement to make a heightmap, which is then converted into a polygonal surface. This creates a decent mountainous landscape. Enough for backdrops or quickies.

2) Second, after making a texture from a material and rendering it out Top-View, I get a cool, two-toned grass/dirt surface that is determined by how sheer a surface is (in this case, the flatter, the more grass). With a quick Y-axis planar UV, the mountain is almost good to go!
CLICK HERE FOR THE PREVIEW!
But wait, there's more!

3) I need the shadows! This idea comes from lightmass in bigger engines such as Frostbite and UDK, only they aren't a separate thing... I have to burn them into the texture that I made for the mountain. This is where I import some scenery into Maya that I intend on dropping and placing where necessary in HPL. I make the scenery black in Maya, and the mountain surface completely white. I then create a directional light in the scene that is turned and angled to match the skybox I used. When I go to make another Top-View render, it will now look black and white, with the shadows from the trees, house, and mountainside.
CLICK HERE FOR THE PREVIEW!

4) Now I throw both into Photoshop and soften the "shadow map" a bit with a gaussian blur so it's not as sharp on the edges. Then I place the "shadow map" over the base texture, set it to multiply, and lower the opacity a bit so the shadows are a little more transparent. And now we have some directional shadow casts!
CLICK HERE FOR THE PREVIEW!

5) So now I slap the finished texture onto the model to see how the suit fits.
CLICK HERE FOR THE PREVIEW!

6) Now we clean up the scene a bit (for example, tweaking vertexes, deleting faces that will be off screen, etc.), export the model, and test it in the editors. From there, we open the mountain's material. We want some of the map to have dark spots, so we set the texture to the illumination channel, and so there isn't excessive bloom, I made the diffuse use the "technical_black_plane". The terrain already has its shadows and "light", so setting it to illuminate is unnoticeable (how many of you thought there was a bright boxlight around the map? hehe, it's actually 0.2-0.2-0.2-1) and allows me to adjust the other scenery pieces

7) From there, you do as you would normally, fill in the details, place some water, add some global fog, a skybox, I even decided to add a distant, subtle cityline for some visual breakup. Which actually uses the same zimmerman_house as in the scene. But with it being dark and so far away, it's hardly noticeable.

And that's about it! =]