Hello - I’m just getting acquainted with Mudbox so please bare with me if some of this is somewhat simplistic.  I work in the design visualization dept for a fairly large engineering/design firm.  I was recently challenged by some of the designers to come up with a way to help the “old guard” get back into mix a bit.  So I have a small group of landscape architects that I want to teach how to do some schematic design in 3D.  We have Max and Maya, but I was thinking mudbox might be a bit more intuitive for them as they are more fine artists than technical people and I find the sculpting feel of mudbox more closely resembles that of real sculpting.  So here is my list of questions:

1.  Can mudbox use a height map like Max/Maya do?  I’d like to be able to apply it to a plane to reproduce the site’s “existing conditions”.

2.  are there any tutorials out there specifically geared towards generating smaller scale terrains.  I see LOADS of tutorials for sculpting creatures and aliens and the like, but not a ton in the way of terrain.  To those ends, the terrain tutorials that are out there are for creating huge mountain ranges and landscapes of real dynamic change.  These guys would be working on a couple of acres, grading subdivisions, retaining walls, etc. 

3.  how would you go about making a road?  This might be too specific a question, but once I get my landform deformed, I would like to take a brush that is roughly the size of a road in my model, and have it push everything it touches down 6”.  The end result is something that looks like a road with curbs on either side.  I messed with the scrape tool a bit, but couldn’t make it a sharp edge. 

That’s all I have for now.  If anyone out there can point me in the right direction I would really appreciate it.  Take care.

1) Yes. You can bring in a map and displace geometry with it, just like in Max and Maya. If it’s 32bit you’ll get plenty of precision too.

2) Sascha Henricks has been making some environment tutorials. Here’s one for a stone.

http://area.autodesk.com/tutorials/mudbox_techniques_for_props_2_stone

Those techniques should apply to larger landscape features too. But you’re right that there aren’t many tutorials for landscapes.

3) I’d probably Freeze the area I want the road on using a large hardish edged brush, invert the mask, then use Flood with a standard sculpt brush and Invert on (which pushes in rather than out). The strength dictates how much the offset happens and flood means it does the action evenly over the whole mesh. The frozen area remains unaffected. Or you could do it on a new layer. That way you could affect the strength of the offset afterwards and it remains non-destructively.