MOUNTAINS
In the making of Distant Life, I was invested in creating a immersive world for the scenes. The opening shot and the end scene had these big landscapes, which I want to show off here.
Credits:
Direction, modeling, texturing, lighting, animation, rendering, compositing & grading by Simon Søgaard Vallinder
Audio by Hannes Schönberg
BACKGROUND
With the software World Creator, you construct a landscape with different tools, and then export that data as images, such as the four squares you see in the lower right part of the image below. That information is read as height data, which means that black is zero meters and white is a given number, say 2000 meters. Then everything between is read linearly where 10% white (which is dark gray), is 200 meters. The detail you achieve in this method can be hard to wrap your head around at first, but as you get familiar with the principle it is obvious how to understand it. Below the image, I demonstrate an interactive 3D model of the mountain. You can rotate, zoom in and see the mountain it its full without textures. (Only on the desktop version of the site).
