Build your own gaming computer

Byline: S. D. Katz

With mortgage rates at all time lows, maybe it's time to plow what's left of your 401k into a little real estate. Or you could load up Bryce, Vue d'Esprit, or WorldBuilder and roll your own piece of digital paradise. Since the mid-1990s, dedicated terrain creation programs have attracted a fan base of hobbyists who use the programs for digital illustration and fantasy art. Lately, improved speed and rendering quality have made them viable solutions for digital matte paintings and movie previsualization, but that's in the short term. Within the next 15 years, as processing power increases, we will see photorealistic interactive virtual worlds populated by avatars standing in for you and me. Welcome to the future of entertainment.

We see glimpses of this future in online gaming, while the underlying technology is developed in world-generation products like MojoWorld. For Millimeter readers, practical interest in this software is as a production tool; the world-building visionaries are focusing on virtual exploration. The difference has been elegantly summed up by patriarch of world-building Ken Musgrave with the phrase, "Context not content."

For those of us who labor in the content-oriented camp, our standards and expectations are dictated at least in part by practical concerns and our experience with professional 3D software. To some extent, dedicated landscape generation software applications are scaled down versions of apps like Maya and 3ds Max offering an optimized tools set, lots of presets, and ease of use. Users of the heavy iron like Maya may consider prosumer applications such as Bryce and Vue d'Esprit beneath them. But these apps suggest something tantalizing: a CGI future that finally achieves the goal of the digital backlot in which locations from the Lower East Side to the Sahara Desert are downloadable databases. That reality may still be a decade or more away, but the current state of landscape generation gives a pretty good indication of how future tools will function.

While a prefab world is of interest to production designers and location finders, digital illustrators are more interested in works of the imagination. The majority of scenes made by Bryce and WorldBuilder users are fantasy or sci-fi inspired - but there are also digital artists who are interested in imagined naturalism. Not only do these landscape artists avoid actual locations, but some such as Luc Bianca, who works in France, also adhere to a sort of digital fundamentalism in which their work is generated entirely in a 3D app. They take pride in not retouching their work and phrases like "made entirely in..." often accompany landscape illustrations on digital illustration web galleries.

This raises the issue of how landscapes are created, and philosophically what constitutes the artistic process. Historically, computer graphics have been deeply influenced by the traditional arts. Photographic texture maps, painted digital scenery, and handmade elements are an accepted part of a CG artist's arsenal of techniques. But it is also possible to synthesize surfaces, textures, and all aspects of the visual field entirely through the manipulation of code. These procedural methods are the "purest" use of computer graphics, and as computational power increases it is likely that they will begin to replace the timesaving visual shortcuts that we depend on in the visual effects industry.

Which brings us to the reality of making an acre of anyplace. Ultimately, like all CGI, the only manageable scenes are based on the classic cheats, namely texture maps rather than geometry, bump maps, billboards (plant and rock texture maps on clear polygons), cycloramas, and the rest of the digital illusionist's playbook. This is all necessary because the world is heavy, man. The scrubby weeds and ground cover in your backyard replicated in software would require trillions of polygons, far too many to be computed with today's hardware.

Whether you are using Bryce, Vue d'Esprit, MojoWorld, or Maya, all landscape generation uses some specific techniques. Mountains and deserts are essentially displacement maps based on grayscale images or datasets from national geological surveys (see "Smile, You're on Candid Camera" sidebar, page 58). Grasses and other simple-shaped foliage can be generated using particle systems or other efficient methods of instancing an object, while fractal and noise functions can be used to generate terrains, skies, and water turbulence. There are variations of course, but all landscape creation applications rely on some or all of these core techniques.

As the programs have evolved, many of the landscape generators have added more sophisticated rendering capabilities, including volumetric lighting, caustics for underwater scenes, and advanced cloud and atmospheric algorithms for haze and aerial perspective. At the moment, only 3D Native's World Construction Set supports High Dynamic Range Imaging maps, however, many other developers are considering this feature as well. While dynamics and simulation capabilities are available in some of the applications, realistic waves and running streams (fluid dynamics) are yet to come.

In this article I'll cover the most interesting and relevant landscape applications for visual effects production including the 3D apps, Bryce, Vue d'Esprit, Terragen, World Construction Set, WorldBuilder, and MojoWorld. One caveat: Products that are great for the hobbyist may not make the grade for Millimeter's audience of professional visual effects readers. The dividing line between professional and hobbyist hinges on the axis of animation vs. still imagery. Almost all the hobbyists' products evaluated can be used for 2D professional concept art and previz, but are less effective for animation.

Corel: Bryce 5

Bryce was not the first landscape creation product, but it popularized the idea of making illustrations procedurally and opened the area to hobbyists. Corel is the new developer of Bryce, and this latest version retains the MetaCreation's interface (similar to Poser's), which is a simplified, non-traditional user interface. CG artists accustomed to multiple simultaneous scene views, toolbars, and loads of moveable palettes, however, may find Bryce's dashboard deployment of tools an inefficient use of screen space.

While Bryce deserves a full review in a magazine for hobbyists, it is not really designed for the visual effects market. Bryce has reasonably good procedural terrains and very good sky and water generation, but its atmospherics are not up to the level of Vue and Terragen, and its raytracer, while improved, is slow. It recently added a network renderer, an essential for animation. The newly added Tree Lab is simply not on the same level as Xfrog, Tree Professional, or Vue. While good at far and middle distances, Bryce trees are unacceptable for motion picture visual effects. Bryce is useful as a previz tool when used in conjunction with Poser and Photoshop for 2D conceptual art. However, there are competing products that should be considered first.

E-on: Vue d'Esprit

At the moment, Vue d'Esprit and Digital Element's WorldBuilder offer the best combination of ease of use and a complete feature list of the several landscape generators that are available (World Construction Set is an interesting runner-up). That means they have realistic landscape, sky, and botanical capabilities. A quick look at the images on these pages shows just how photoreal the results in Vue d'Esprit can be. Available for Windows and Mac (OS X only), Vue d'Esprit 4 is a pleasure to use. It is clearly a high-end hobbyists' tool with enough horsepower to be of use in professional production for boutiques and lone wolf CG artists.

Vue is essentially an advanced version of Bryce. While Bryce 5 has some nice features of its own, including a sky dome with properly positioned stars, Vue will yield more photorealistic scenes and its foliage is far superior. In Vue d'Esprit you begin the creation process by selecting an atmosphere from the preset palette, which features picons of atmospheres. You can modify these or create your own. An atmosphere defines the sun's position, the sky (including clouds and haze), and ambient light. You can change the individual parameters in the atmosphere palette and move the sun to change the time of day. Terrains, rocks, planets, and foliage are then added to the scene, and Vue smartly provides layers for these additional objects. This is essential for managing hundreds of objects.