As the Teton fault moves, two things happen. The left/west side of the fault goes up and left, and the right/east side of the fault drops down and pulls to the right.
After fumbling about for a while, I decided to approach the shot thusly:
I created a flat mesh in Lightwave.
Then I bent this mesh - the right side downward and the left side upward, roughly matching the movement of the land along the fault. It doesn't look like much at this point, I know.
I saved both of these objects. Lightwave allows me to 'morph' from one object to another, over time, so I can start with the flat landscape and morph it into the bent, broken landscape.
Next, I employed another of Lightwave's tricks: displacement mapping. A displacement map distorts the mesh based on the light/dark values in an image. White is high; black is low. I created a displacement map of the region by pulling down a ton of DEM files from the US Geological Service. A DEM file is a 3D survey map of a given region. I used an application called 3DEM to stitch all the tiny DEM files together and save them as a black-and-white image. Here it is:
For the final animation, I applied the morph, over time, to break the landscape, and also brought in the displacement map over time, to push the mesh into the proper shape.
This left me with a completely flat landscape at the beginning, which didn't work, so I created a second, semi-random displacement map. The random displacement map appears at the beginning, then fades out over time, while the 'true' displacement maps slowly fades in over time.
Here's a sequence of five frames from the animation. The finished shot runs 8 seconds, or 240 frames.
(click to enlarge)
Since the landscape changes drastically over time, I made use of a 'procedural' terrain, rather than an image map. A procedural map creates colors based on (sometimes) simple calculations. For example, if the land is relatively flat, make it green. If it is steeper, make it brown. If it is very steep, make it white.
