Hyperfocal Terrains from Hyperfocal Design

By Jeff Mottle (jmottle@cgarchitect.com)

Jeff Mottle is the President and Founder of CGarchitect.com and is the North American Production Director for Smoothe.

For those of you who are familiar with Hyperfocal design, the digital art production company based in South Australia, you may already know of their Hyperfocal skies texture collection released in May of 2003. Recently Hyperfocal design released a new collection, Hyperfocal terrains, featuring 92 high-resolution terrain textures including grass, rock, sand, gravel and more.

The texture CD is made up of 92 terrain textures in JPEG format and also includes an HTML image browser. The collection itself is divided into six categories and also includes two bonus sky textures. The categories are dirt and mud, grass, gravel and pebbles, rock and stone, sand and beach, and finally a miscellaneous category.

To see sample thumbnails of each category you can visit the Hyperfocal website here: http://www.hyperfocaldesign.com/terrains_thumbnails.htm

The resolution of each texture varies slightly from image to image, but for the most part are 2048 x 2048 pixels large. You will also find several textures that are nearly double this resolution as well.

All of the textures are high-resolution and fully tilable and should suffice for most situations. The exception to this rule may be very large landscapes or terrains, where you may need to create your own higher res versions or utilize some sort of mix mapping or texture blending to hide the tiling. This is not so much a limitation of this collection, but rather a problem you run into when attempting to texture on large terrain surfaces. The great part about this collection, is that you have some excellent base material to work with should you need to create your own higher res versions or hybrids.

All of the textures are very evenly list and it is very evident that great care was taken both during the photography process, as well as the post processing done on the images.

I have rendered out a number of scenes below to highlight how they work in actual scenes. The grass textures in particular work exceptionally well with Vray displacement.