Paradise Found

Well, it's Friday night, that means it's the night after Pancake Night (If you're ever in the neihborhood on Thursday night, ask me for some fresh pancakes!), which means... I should add something to the blog... for some reason.



Click the image above for a larger view. As you can see here, for once I'm not posting about Tahu (who's only missing his sword and his trusty Kanohi at this point), and instead am posting my interpretation of good ol' Mata-Nui island. If you look closely you can see Gilligan shipwrecked off of Ta-Wahi... not really, but it's a funny visual anyway.

Mata-Nui island was created by first using an official image of Mata-Nui, and cutting out every nook and cranny, and turning it into a black and white mask as seen below.


This is becoming the alpha mask for the Mata-Nui model. "What does that mean" I hear you cry? Well, this image will be applied to a large flat 3d plane, and every section of the image that's black will become invisible, in a sense, acting like a 3D cookie cutter, giving us a flat model in the shape of Mata-Nui.

For example...



What comes next is a displacement map. For those not familiar with 3D modeling, displacement maps are greyscale images which actually affect the geometry of the model. I tried many times to write an explanation here, but, it's easiest just to show you.

This is the map in question, simply a greyscale version of the well known Mata-Nui image.


Which then applied to our "cookie cutted" plane model...
As you can see it's gotten bumpier, and crevases have appeared. Basically what's going on, is whatever is brighter in the image, makes it "higher" on the model, whatever is darker is "lower", thus creating a bumpy landscape exacly like the image. However, that's still not enough, more terrain work is neccisary. And is when I actually do some modeling work by hand, and raising and lowering the correct areas to create the terrain of the island. Once that's done, I apply the texture, which unlike the other images, is not the official Mata-Nui image, for I didn't think there was as much detail as I wanted.


There are alterations to be made to this texture (such as shrinking the shoreline to make the island appear bigger), but all in all it did help add more detail to the look then using the LEGO image would've given me (not to mention that's just being lazy!). So there you have it, that's how to make a Mata-Nui island.

As a side note, you may have noticed the music playing. I created it as a sort of test to see how BQOTT's finale could possibly sound. While it may sound alot like the source materials (MNOLG Vakama's Speech, Ga-Koro Victory, and a theme from Mask of Light), it's all brand new, composed by yours truly. Is there anything I can't do?.... Well yes... but... I can pretend I can do it all!

Until we meet again, I will make sure to not state what the next update will be, because I'm never correct.