Next, I worked on the terrain filters. While the isolines define the general shape of your terrain, filters give it its unique look by creating canyons, cliffs or erosion.

This terrain needed three filters:

I wanted to add cascades coming from various cliffs so I added rivers. This is a unique feature of Geocontrol 2. You place springs, decide the type of rivers you want, whether you want lakes or not, and click the postwork button. Geocontrol then places rivers and lakes where appropriate.

Step 2. Exports and imports in Vue

I generated this terrain in 2048*2048 size. 4096*4096 would have been great too, but I kept having odd results with it. I exported the terrain in tiff 16 bit greyscale for use in Vue.

I then exported two material distribution maps. This feature of Geocontrol enables you to have materials on specific areas of your Vue terrain: rocky areas, sediments or water for instance.

In this case I wanted sediments and water.

In the selectors menu, I selected thin flows sediments, and created a distribution map with it. On this preview, the red areas are where the sediments density is highest.Then I then it to bmp format.

I created two selectors for rivers : one of the deep areas and a mask for all waters. I used a mixture of both in my scene.

After exporting these distribution maps, this was the end of my work in Geocontrol.

Step 3. Material distribution on the main terrain

Opening a blank Vue scene, I first created a normal terrain. In Vue 6, you needed to use procedural terrains to retain all the details of the Geocontrol heightfield. In Vue 7, it works fine with a standard terrain.

I edited the terrain, making the following changes :

Closing the terrain editor, I had my terrain in place.
Then I chose a point of view. I wanted to have a building on top of one of the cliffs, so I placed one of the smaller ones of the foreground at the bottom left corner.

Now the tricky part : the material distribution!

I started from the base default material and created a set of mixed materials for every distinct area.

The process is rather simple:

In the case of water, I blended both the deep water and water mask.

One thing to remember: for proper masking, you need to use Object Parametric mapping for mixed terrains.

I created several different mixed materials, one for every area that I needed. Here is the final structure of my terrain material:

     Forest
       Forest
        Forest
              Complex forest
                    Tree ecosystem (5 layers)
                    Forest ground
              Shale sandstone
        Sediment areas
            Shale sandstone (scattered stones)
            grass (ecosystem)
            Large scale pale grass
       Canyon sandstones (cliffs)
     Water
       clear water
       foamy water

I use mixed materials as I find the management of the distribution far easier than with layers.

Here is how the material mix looks on the terrain:

Sandstone is brown, forest ground is green, eroded area are pale, green water is blue.

I used a classic Vue distribution (slope/altitude) for the cliffs and the clear/foamy water.

Step 4. Replacing with real materials

Working in two steps, material distribution, then actual material choice, makes it far easier to really see where everything goes.

Then I chose real materials for the whole scene.

The forest ground is a mix of a procedural texture (ground) with a bitmap one (for the leaves). I made a variation of the stock "rock and grass" Vue material.

The sandstone material I used in several of my terrain is from Dave Burdick's Rock my World pack (for sale at Cornucopia3D). This is the first time I used these materials, but certainly not the last.

The water is a mix of classic clear water and foamy water. I got rid of most of the transparency for the latter one. Water is tricky to use on Geocontrol terrains as if you get too much transparency, you actually end up seeing through the terrain. There is no actual water surface.

For the forests, I used a rather complex ecosystem with no less than 5 layers. I do this to simulate the tree distribution in an actual forest. If you use a "normal" ecosystem, you tend to have an even distribution of tree species. In a real forest, they seed from each other and therefore tend to grow in clusters.

To simulate this, I use two layers for each tree specie:

First set of large oaks.

Mid sized ones added.

Beeches added in the area between the oaks.

Bushes to fill the voids.

And a dynamic ecosystem to place grass in the eroded areas.

Step 5. Other elements and atmosphere

Here is how the image looks with the default lighting before adding external meshes.

First, I added a second terrain between the main one, in order to close the view. It is also generated with Geocontrol, but has a smaller resolution (1024) and a simpler material (no rivers). It is easy to use the same materials on two different Geocontrol terrains: all you have to do is change the bitmap masks used in it.

Before adding external meshes to the image, I narrowed the point of view a bit, using a 50mm lens instead of the default 35mm one.

Then I added the Elven village church from Chikako and a small gazebo (also found in the village package).

To place buildings like these accurately on the terrain, I typically create a dedicated camera and rotate around them, making test renders from various angles.

I also added:

The characters are Poser ones. To make it possible to include them in this already large scene, I Imported them in a separate scene and decimated them to 1/4 of their initial polygon count. They look a bit like characters from Second Life, but as they will be tiny on the final image, it does not really matter

The atmosphere is what I did last. I generally work like this, as complex atmospheres take longer to render and can hide important elements. Moreover, if a scene looks correct in the default atmosphere, it should look good with a decent one.

To make this atmosphere I:

This way, I had a thick fog in the valleys, haze in the background and the right amount of distance attenuation.

Here's a wide view of the final scene with all its elements.

And here is a narrower view that I finally selected.