The final stage for my environment creation was to add in the un-reachable geometry. As this will be far in the distance I won't be modelling any meshes and focus more on the texture. Before I started in 3ds max I had already created a very basic outline of what needed to be unreachable geometry. I very quickly highlighted anything that I felt would be treated as unreachable geometry as the majority was a dense forest surrounding either side of the tower.
This part of the project gave me a small headache as I first tried using a generic forest texture to create a top down view which I hoped would pass for a forest. As you can see in the screenshots below this had an horrendous effect which not only looks bad but also does nothing for my environment as from a view atop the tower you can only see a pixelated green mess. This is not how i envisioned the final environment to be and I will need to look for new means to create at least a believable horizon, as my trailer involves scaling the tower
One of my peers suggested that I try a Google maps image as that will at least an accurate representation of the environment around the tower. Again this method of creating a plane a placing a texture on top of resulted a very pixelated image that you can barely make out near the top of the tower. After this attempt I decided I would need try an entirely new approach to creating my non-reachable geometry.
After a long headache and some discussions with my peers we came up with the idea of using a cylinder shape around the environment at distance to create an horizon effect. I done this by taking a cone and taking the top and bottom off am left with a piece of geometry that wraps all the way around my environment. Then I went and found a texture of a horizon behind some fields that would suit my needs and created a alpha map to block out the sky in the image.
Overall I'm quite happy with the effect it has created with suits my environment fairly well. This unit was completed fairly quickly when compared to the the previous unit which has allowed me to catch up slightly with my deadlines. As I've mentioned before the best way for me to improve on this environment would most likely be to go and gather primary research as that would've proved to be invaluable during the creation of my environment.