Real-World Terrain

Terrain is the ground upon which all things will rest in your CG environment. Your terrain mesh, depending on your project, may be the largest single object in your entire scene. Often, these objects have half a million or more polygons, hundreds of texture maps, and cover more area than any other object. Until recently, the terrain mesh type most often encountered in CG animation was either completely flat, as in fairly early CG animations, or full of unrealistic hills and valleys based on simple randomized height maps. More recently, terrain has become highly realistic.