Lupinus Valley
I grew up next to a forest, and the forest had these rough paths that wound through it. I loved biking down these paths and finding various clearings, where there were often interesting things like patches of flowers or big logs and rocks and whatnot. Now that I live in the city, I miss being able to wake up every morning and see nature outside of my window, and I miss being able to just walk into the woods.
For this piece, I wanted to create a place that recaptures that sense of coming upon a clearing and finding something cool, and I also wanted to create a place where I would want to stay to get away from the bustle of the city. I didn't want to recreate the woods I know exactly though; instead, I wanted to create a more imagined heightened sort of place that recreates the sense of going through those woods.
Software and equipment used
Maya, XGen, RenderMan, Photoshop, Lightroom
05 February 2021
Here's a screencapture of my final Maya viewport. All of the blue things are bounding boxes of geometry instanced using XGen... I wound up having to rely on XGen way more than I originally anticipated!
I've also included some final render passes. The first pass is the base beauty pass, and the second pass is all of the volumes in the scene. The volumes were actually rendered using a couple of different passes, but I've combined them all here to make the presentation a bit clearer.
05 February 2021
In the end I decided go with the original cabin idea, but since I didn't have much time remaining, I wound up just kitbashing together a cabin from Evermotion assets instead of modeling one from scratch. I still made sure to make it a cabin I'd want to stay in though!
Here's a test render of integrating the cabin into the forest environment:
05 February 2021
The plan from the start of the project was to put a cabin in the scene, but once I realized that I wasn't going to have as much time as I would have liked to work on this project, I started thinking about backup plans in case I didn't have time to model a cabin. One idea I briefly played with was a hot air balloon scene. I wound up abandoning this backup idea and eventually was able to go with the original cabin idea, but I got far enough with the hot air balloon idea to put together this test:
05 February 2021
Here are some more progress images from building out the forest set. I thought it would be fun to cover the forest floor with lupinus plants, which are common in Northern California's alpine forests in the early summer.
On a technical note, I've never made a forest quite like this before, so I had to experiment a lot! The moss was especially challenging to figure out how to make- the solution I wound up going with uses Maya's XGen plugin. The second image in this post is the moss test that finally convinced me that I was going to be able to get the moss to look okay.
05 February 2021
Here are some really early tests where I was just playing with broad ideas about a general layout. I started this project shortly after a ski trip that was located in a more alpine sort of region, and after I got back, I started tinkering with an alpine forest sort of look. That basically meant rocks, cliffs, and conifers to start.
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