Not sure if this is the right place to ask, but what the hell :P

I generally do all my work in Poser, in fact, make that "I do all my work in Poser"... :) And recently I've had this idea kicking around in my head for a Medieval Fantasy City type thing... So, what I was looking for was a landscape which I could render in Poser at a relatively decent distance away (gotta fit an entire city in there :P).

The way I had it pictured in my head was a VERY large meteor crater on the coast line, with a rock pinicle at the centre on which my virtual denziens would build their castle (see image).... One thing that isn't clear from this plan is that I was hoping to make the north-eastern edge of the rim cliff-like, so the rich people would have good views, and the south western side more of a low mound (so the docks will work). Obviously the east-south-east side needs to be ground level to let the river thru, and the north western side would need to be at least a sand bank to create the harbour...

The crater would also provide a natural harbour, and a prolific supply of rare minerals (lode stones, mithril etc), and with a river draining into it it would create the perfect site for a capital city.

Anyways, I'm more than happy to do all the post-work on the landscape adding the dockyards, buildings, castle, grime, flags etc... I'm not asking for anyone to do this render (commercially or otherwise), all I'm looking for is a decent landscape file I can import into Poser, so I can fiddle :P

Does anyone know where I could download anything like this which will work in Poser?

Hope this makes sense to someone out there... I'd _really_like to get this going...

Thanx,
Fych.

It should be possible to create a landscape like this in Vue d'Esprit. It can be exported from Vue as an .obj file and imported into Poser. It will be a fairly large file though. However, if you are aiming at creating a scene like this, it would actually be a good idea to do it all in Vue and not involve Poser at all. That would take care of texturing the terrains and creating a nice sky as well. Vue can create a terrain from an elevation map. If you could do a map similar to the one you posted, but with different shades of grey representing elevations, I could run it through Vue's terrain generator and give you a picture of what it could look like.

Unfortunately, I don't have Vue d'Esprit, and coz this is more of a one off than a serious hobby/job I'm unwilling to shell out the money needed to buy a new program for this one item.... I'll see what I can knock together for a grey-scale terrain map in a while (got meeting coming up)... Thanks loads for the offer :)

maybe i could create such a thing as an OBJ - i'll contact you the next days ... joekurz (aka jenay)

hi - i just created this terrain map - let's see, whether i can convert it into a suitable OBJ file ... joekurz (aka jenay) let me know whether the terrain map fits ...

Wow. WOW :) Absolutely fantastic. If I could be REALLY picky tho, I'd say that perhaps the river was too wide (about half that would be perfect), and the rock pinicle in the middle is again about twice the size I was thinking.... But then, that's about a thousand times better than any botch job I couldda done with a downloaded crater... :) :) Wow again. Thanx :) Fychan (Getting very excited about this project now)...

If you ever get this finished between you, I'd really like to see the result. Jack

I'll be more than happy to post the finished render to the gallery :)

I did a real quick work on jenay's terrain map in Vue's terrain generator. Looks like an island right now since the water stretches beyond the terrain, but that is easily fixed by adding more terrain (told you it was a quick job ;-)

Woo woo :) :) :) :) :)

Wow I can really see this coming together now, you have NO idea just how excited by all this I am :)

A couple of quick Q's.... Is this going to be able to work like this in Poser (I'm particularly worried about the water here...), roughly how big is the .obj file, can the arms of the crater extend out a little more and would it be possible to lower the hills on the main land mass?

I mean the northern side of the crater (as it would be on my plan) is perfect, but I think most of the rest of it is a bit too hilly for a city to really take off in this location..

God I'm being picky when you're all being so brilliant... Please don't take these things the wrong way, I'm SO happy with what's there already, it's like 1000x better than I was expecting to be able to do... It's just... I'm so damn excited now :) (sorry, I feel like I'm reverting back to my childhood and my first Scalectrix track :))

A very happy Fychan... :)

hi phil - yesterday late in the evening i succeeded converting the above bitmap into an obj file and imported it into poser and made a pp2 file out of it. i did some testrenders. see attached pics... (no postwork) i uvmapped it (texture tiles 2x2 times, so you have more details). i am not quite sure it is the thing you wanted. it looks quite good from distance, but very rough in closeups. i added a simple plane and adjusted it to simulate water, you can move the plane up and down to see the shoreline changing. the file has approx. 2 Meg in size and consists out of 128x128 vertices (sorry - that's my limit at the moment) - converting bigger image maps failed... let me know what do you think. if you are familiar with poser you could use some magnets to raise or lower parts of the terrain.

i'll upload the file within the next hours so you can download it at...

(only pp2 file, no textures, no waterplane).
just experiment to see whether it's usefull ...

have fun :)

joekurz (aka jenay)
http://www.joes3dfantasyworlds.com/

hi kel - just saw your posting - looks great :o jenay

What more can I say than thanx guys... It's so much more than I was ever dreaming of. The issue with the closeups isn't going to be a problem, I'm going to be doing a lot of post-work anyway (adding smoke trails, boats etc), and my original idea was only for a long distance shot (a lot like your top-left image). Having said that, I'm now just SO excited, I may end up doing close-up after close-up as well :) And I'd completely forgotten about magnets in Poser, I've had a little experience with them, so now's the time to learn :) And I dunno if you meant to have a URL in your post of where I can d/l it from, but nothing came out.... Thanx guys... LOADS :)

Great work, jenay! And ready for Poser too, that is one step beyond me ;-) Fychan, my terrain can be exported as a .obj file which can be read by Poser. The water has to be added in Poseer. The file size is totally dependent on the resolution of the mesh exported. The one I created is about 500 000 polygons, which will result in 41.6 Mb, a bit steep I think... Reducing it to 32 000 polygons will mean 2.6 Mb. Vue will also export a texture map and a bump map created from the procedural material used in the Vue scene. Give jenay's great contribution a try when he uploads it, it looks really nice. I'll see if I can do some additional work on mine tonight (I'm at the office now, and sculpting terrains is not really part of my job description, LOL)

Attached Link: http://www.renderosity.com/artistdownload.ez?Who=jenay&fileid=1240&key=916411

hi phil, ok - just uploaded it - here is the link: http://www.renderosity.com/artistdownload.ez?Who=jenay&fileid=1240&key=916411 (it's a private link) have fun :) and thanks for the compliments, kelderek :) i am looking forward, what you will create ... now i am in the office too - have go to work ... joekurz (aka jenay)

Hmmm, you see, my wife is far more strict than my boss, so I end up doing all my rendering at work :P Fortunately, I have 2 machines, so I set the render going on one, and then work on the other one.... Which is cool, as it means that I can happily do >72 hour renders without any issues :) Not that I've done any that big yet.... But I think this one might just get there this time around :)

Don't laugh :P I know it's not great..., in fact, it's not even good, but I thought I'd post where I've got to so far. The image was rendered at 1024, but file size limitations means I've had to reduce it in size and quality a lot... It doesn't look _much_ better full size, but there's more detail on the boats and buildings at least :P There's no texture on the ground (except default ground texture) and a very rudimentary bump map... This is really only here so you can get an idea of where I'm intending on going with this... This is the sort of scale I'm looking at for instance. I'll be adding some houses, shops, inn's and primitive industrial buildings (iron foundry's etc) later on... The time to open, load and save was getting excessive, not to mention the machine chugging when I tried to move anything around :) So I thought I'd add some buildings in post work, but have subsequently found this to be even harder.... Anyways, enough whinging.... I'll get it done... Oh, and I forgot, there's a forest that needs adding too... Whew, render overload here we come :) Wave crests, tracks, beaches, granite effect added in post work. The sea is a flat place with a texture... I'm dying to know how you made that lovely sea you have in your image above jenay.... Oh, and I know I need to do the lighting, but it was becoming impossible to work with, so I reset it to default for the moment :)

hi - looks interesting - your water texture is not so bad. i only used a rippled blue glass texture for the see surface. you should add bump maps for more realism... the bridge seems a bit oversized in comparison to the other objects. i guess it will much much work. but hope you have fun :) joekurz (aka jenay)

Did a little work on the terrain to make it easier to build on! Extended the "crater arms" a little as well. I can export it as an obj with textures if you want to, just send me your e-mail.