Patreon Peeks 3: Reverb Racing Mountain (Patreon)

Hello! Today I wanted to share a bit of 3D modeling that I used in my video for FMOD about adaptive audio (https://youtu.be/p-FLWabby4Y). In the scene with a fictional racing game, I created a 3D car and racetrack to showcase how sound effects can undergo an adaptive filter in video games—in this case, tunnel reverb.

The scene is one of the more advanced 3D effects I've made in a What I Love video, and it's all done in Blender using handmade models, shaders, animation, and Blender's "Freestyle" effect, which can draw outlines around models. Today I wanted to share the mountain from that racetrack, as it uses a unique material.

This is the raw model of the mountain, created from a plugin for Blender called ANT Landscapes, which I particularly love for its options for stratifying the terrain. I kind of  crammed it into position, cutting into its polygons to create the tunnel through it, which I wouldn't normally recommend. But given the shader I end up applying to it, it doesn't make much difference.

Here's how the mountain shader looks (Freestyle not applied). The nodes at the bottom of the screenshot build this shader. The "position" of the Geometry node on the very left is the mountain's physical position, from which I separate out just the Z position, which is the mountain's altitude. That gets multiplied by the mountain's "normal" vector, making it look more like illumination from a light source than just an altitude map. The combined vector is put through a color ramp (a value of 0 is the leftmost color, and a value of 1 is the rightmost color), providing the sharp colors you see, and then all of that is applied to a light-emitting material, so there's no worry about shadows or gradients. Where the color ramp reads black, this material is no different from the black background.

The strength of the light emission is only 0.25 (out of 1), so none of the colors are nearly as bright as the color ramp suggests. I did this after finishing all these node connections and seeing that the mountain attracted too much attention; the focus is meant to be the tunnel, and the mountain is only a set piece. But, for the sake of stylized video graphics that evoke an interesting video game, this set piece was worth the effort!