Quadspinner Gaea Snowy Landscape to Maya Part 1 @cowsmanaut

Uploaded March 2019 | Updated September 2026, 1 day ago

This video talks about my thought process for creating the Hero mountain for the foreground of our arctic mountain landscape. This covers the creation of rocky outcrop shapes, detailing snow, and complex texture creation.

This again is mainly a thought process for creation of the scene and my solutions for what I needed, but I don't go in depth into how each node works. For deeper insight into each node, you can check out the documentation, play with the nodes, or wait until I eventually get down to those videos. :)

As usual, feel free top pause, rewind and repeat to follow along with me as I create this scene.

In the next video we will cover background mountains and take it into Maya for final set up and render.

Quadspinner Gaea Snowy Landscape to Maya Part 1

Quadspinner Gaea - Patching edges to make multiple tiles seam together

$Creating maps and connecting them in Maya. This video focuses on the core concepts of what a map is, how to break it up and why, and how to connect it in Maya. This is focused to give beginners a breakdown of how Mapping works, and the pitfalls of connecting maps in Maya when your spec or roughness maps may not work. I hope you find this video helpful. More info: A large number of map types can exist, a few names would be: Specular map - how reflective or not an area is. (linear) Roughness map - how blurry an area of reflection is. White is very blurry (linear) Metalness map - Metals in Arnold override specularity. White areas of this map will make those regions metal. Inbetween values with blend with the specular values already existing. Bump Map - black and white map where black is depth, grey can be flat and white is raised. Do not set your bump values to 1 if they are high contrast. Values for most bump maps are between. .2 and .02 (linear) Normal map - Green and red channels define the angle of the pixel, while blue adds contrast. This is one of the only colour maps which is still linear be sure to set it to raw. (Linear) Ior Map - this should e in 32bit mode and saved as HDR or EXR. Controls how light bends for reflection and refraction. (linear) There are a variety of other maps.. Keep in mind that if the map is saved as colour information and is USED as colour information, then it can remain SRGB.$

Quadspinner Gaea Exploring Ways to make a Crater

8 bit, 16 bit, and 32 bit colour modes. What and how.

Gaea EAP Creating branching mountain and island forms

Gaea Beginners experimentation and iteration