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This image was done using Maya, After Effects, Photoshop and Deep Paint 3D and it was done in about a month (working at night on it-- as a personal sort of 'therapy project!') lately, my 'day job' has me working on a lot of interior architecture (hard edged objects, corridors, confined spaces, etc) and i wanted to something 'organic' and open.. i grew up on a farm in Ohio-- and this piece was a result of those memories. |
Initial Layout
this image (below) shows
the initial layout curves and main geometry (which is stand in geo for the
moment)..
you can see that i was trying to define the curves and shape of the river
and the dirt path with these curves.
once the curves were
drawn and i liked where they were flowing (from the camera's point of view),
i then created a poly plane primitive and subdivided it many times. I used
the sculpt polygon tool (Maya)
to get the shape of the terrain to be what i wanted.
Here are a couple of
images which show the scene being developed.. and first pass (very rough)
textures being applied -- just to get a sense of color and feel. (the water
was just a reflective plane at this point, too)
Objects/props
once the terrain was
acceptable-- i moved on to modeling the buildings and major props..
All of these objects were 'box modeled' using Maya. (note: i only added details
where it
was needed and based this on the objects distance from the camera/viewer)
i also used displacement
maps for the stonework on the house and the chapel-- so the wire frame geo
was kept low res, for poly count issues.
here's the boat geometry and stages:
Organics/foliage
the hardest part of this
piece was the grass and misc foliage such as plants, trees, flowers, etc..
-- because of high polygon counts that they caused! all of the grass and flowers
totaled over 12 million
polygons! (and that is NOT counting the trees!) because of this, i had to
render out sections
of foliage and later comp then together in after effects.
here is an animated gif -- that shows some sections and grass and how it was split up into seperate layers/renders:
as for the grass/foliage,
it was created using Maya's Paint Fx, and then converted into polygons,
so it could be rendered using Mental Ray. here are some images which show
the wireframe and the rendered out foliage:
the trees were created
with software called Xfrog (great software, by the way!-- for trees, etc)
i created the trees and placed them around the 3D scene.. and i rendered them
out in sections
(5-8 trees at a time) and then later composited them in the final scene.
Water dynamics and rendering
as for the water-- i
first studied how fluid dynamics worked on a simple plane (Maya).. and then
i applied
what i learned to the river geometry in my scene.. (i also added the rocks
and the river bank as collision geo for the
simulation to properly calculate the ripples and waves) I then used a modified
ocean shader for the material of the water.
Maya Scene file
..and finally, here's
the environment wire files.. (note: i'm not including the trees, etc.. because
most of the
work for that involved comping effects and post painting to complete the look)
[The images below were screen captured from Maya's hardware shaded view]
..thanks for your time!
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