Max Terrain

Tips & Tricks Mudbox / Max : Road on Terrain Date: 21st Jan 2009

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Tutorial: January Max Wednesday, January 21, 2009 12:27 PM Road on a Terrain:

How does one put a road on an arbit and complex terrain such as this….? First of all lets create a good terrain. Instead of creating a plan in Max and modifying this with a noise deformer. We will create a plane in Mudbox


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Scale this a bit. If we are to match perfectness of a terrain we will have to make sure that we have our properties set correct and values set relative to what inputs data we have. But that is for another time and another exercise.

Press Shift D a few times to increase the level of the plane to 7 this should make the plane mesh pretty dense. We now will displace this surface Map >> Sculpt model using Displace Map >> New Operation


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In the Target Mesh drop down to select the plane. And give the path (or browse) to where the Displacement Map is Click GO

The image above is the image used for the displacement. This image was normalised so that the white is white (255 or 100) and black is black ( 0 , zero). That is to say within our normal color space The process of displacement in Mudbox is much faster compared to most other softwares. When this process is down, we see a very small difference


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We have to remember here that our values of the terrain (i.e Properties) are not of real world hence a 10 X 10 X 10 Is really very small…Mudbox default values are in centimeter. Hence change that to Meters At the values below

We get a pretty good indication of what a mountainous region would look like. Screen clipping taken: 1/21/2009, 1:58 PM

But for this exercise, we will take a more reasonable value


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To get a pretty great terrain

Export this object as an obj file Open Max and import the same file


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This mesh is very dense

Hence run an optimise to bring this to a workable level On running Optimiser and Pro Optimiser in combination the scene file has been brought down to a manageable size of under 200,000 faces.

Collapse stack Change this from an editable Mesh to editable Polygon. Make a copy of the object make it planar


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Editable Polygon gives the option to make the surface planar. Thereby flattening out the terrain

Select the flattened plane and morph it to the original plane (object/terrain)


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Now to create the "road" or "wall" on this terrain. Create a Line across the surface (terrain)

Edit this spline, to create an Outline to the thickness of a road etc.

Extrude the line to create the requisite height

REMEMBER to change the morph value of the terrain such that the terrain is flat.


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Select the curve (extruded object / "road") and put the modifier : Skin Wrap

Click on add and select the plane (terrain).


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Now select the plane (terrain) and change the morph value to change the plane into the terrain.

The "road" (extruded line) will follow along the surface of the terrain.

"road" is colored red so that it will stand out….black merges into the shadow

Max Terrain

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