Improving the Castle and Creating the Backdrop part 2

Following on from my previous, we now have an almost complete castle and the environment is looking pretty good too. The first thing to do now is to finish off the castle, and for that we need the courtyard area. This area was pretty simple to make - all it was was 4 walls which was made from boxes with UVW Maps applied to them, a few benches which we made earlier and to change the textures on the ground. The grass needs to be a brighter green inside the courtyard and there needs to be an area with a stone floor. Once I had this, I imported in my crossbow and placed in where I thought I would need it for my animation.

Now moving back to creating the rest of the environment and more specifically the backdrop itself. I wanted my area that my castle is in to be surrounded my hills and trees; so a forest area. I searched on google for a high resolution image and once I found one I edited it slightly to better fit into the scene. To place the backdrop onto a surface, I created three large planes around the ouside of my scene and bent them so that they have a nice curve instead of a sharp point at the corners. I applied the image on the back plane and flipped it on the two either side so there isn't a noticable seam between the planes. Now we have the backdrop, we can move onto the smaller details around the outside of the castle.

As the backdrop contains alot of trees, I wanted to add some trees of my own to help blend into the backdrop. This helps improve on clutter, aesthetics as well as blending for the animation. To place a tree into the scene, I went into the create menu and went to the AEC Extended drop down list. From there I selected foilage and chose the one that most resembeled the trees in the backdrop. I placed them around the scene and by generating a new seed for each one, each tree is unique and looks slightly different. Using foilage I was also able to create bushes, shrubs and the greenery on the castle wall on the front. This adds more character to the scene and makes the ground terrain less repetitive.