The Arena !!

The Arena !!!

The landscape is as important as the models because the landscape helps tell the story.  Since this part of the story is in a mountainous sandy area this would need to be created in 3ds max. The first step would be to create a plane around 500 width and 500 length. This would mean there is a lot of space to create hills and mountains.  

After the plane has been created a material needs to be added to it using the material editor using the noise attribute with a fall off, this would create the hills at different peaks and locations within the plane. Once this has been done a displace element can be added to the plane from the drop down list. This will allow you to add the material in which was created to the element and apply it to the plane. 

This will give the user a bumpy terrain to work with and from this colour can be added and to give it an extra detail to meet specific needs. In this case plants where added to give the area a more desert feel with a couple of palm trees and in certain areas.

This plane now transformed into a terrain will allow for good camera angels when animating.