Creating an Environment With Cloth in 3ds Max

I've long had issues with creating a random looking environment to hide the horizon in my scenes.  the easiest solution is of course mountains in the background.  3ds max however isnt great at creating something that looks natural.

In the past, to get relatively random looking environments, I've utilized spline lines and then terrain which often results in inconsistent geometry and harsh edges that needed to be re - topologized after the fact. you can see this technique in the mountains of the delorean and ecto 1.  Good for far away blured out backgrounds.

Recently, while working on a kitchen model, I was simulating a cloth over the back of a chair and noticed some very natural shapes being created.  This gave me the idea to utilize cloth in a sort of vacu-forming of an environment.  Using basic geometry I create a simple form structure that follows the basic shape of mountains and valleys.  This is where you would define the different areas of your shot, foreground, background.... room for a building etc.

here is an example of the original mold for the environment.

Create a rectangle spline, add garment maker, adjust the density to something relatively complex depending on how smooth you want your environment to feel.  if its nice flowing hills and valleys you would want more tessellation, if its newer mountains that are rocky and rough you can go with a less dense cloth.  Add the Cloth modifier, add the mold object to the cloth as the collision object.  maybe play with what sort of fabric the cloth is simulating (will get different results depending on how stiff or soft the cloth is)  make sure to turn on self collision.  this stuff will bunch up like a son of a gun.  Then run simulate local and see how you did.  sometimes upping the gravity on the sim will help the vacu-form technique work a bit better.  as you can see you get something with relatively evenly spaced geometry for doing general tweaks with max free form modeling tools

Here is another example that was my first attempt at this technique, you can notice where I've pointed out those natural features that first drew me to the idea

Let me know if this was useful.

Andy