Creating a Valley in Softimage

[Tenshi]

(post this on xsi list, no luck. hope here i get a few suggestions)


Guys! Need your Softimage expertise and advices here.

In a few weeks from now, at my job, i will began creating a scene that contains a lot of geometry, terrain, trees, flowers, rocks, mountains, a show room, a few houses in the valley, polo field. Mostly.. all flora will be green(not dry as in the pictures). Pre-production start next week.

The idea is to show a place where people can relax in different areas with a camera flying around all of this valley, divided in scenes. The final render quality must be Semi-Realistic, not Hollywood realistic; so the client could see how his project will be in a distant future.

Tools i have at my disposal:
-A lot of references i took from the place.
-Softimage 2015 SP2 + Arnold
-Mudbox
-Uvlayout
-After Effects/Nuke.
-Photoshop/Illustrator

So my question is, how can a single person achieve something like that? How the more experienced guys here will tackle this kind of projects., from 0 to 100. Ideas, software, etc all the info will be welcome. If you have tips to accomplished from a tree or mountains more easily, welcome!

I´ve been trying to find a decent Softimage plugin for creating trees, and i find there´s a few out there. I´m looking for an inexpensive yet easy to work with solution.

*Forester comes to mind, but it´s expensive for my client.
Deadline? I think will be a month or at least that´s what i´m alone estimate. I´m slow hehe.


Greetings,

[milanvasek]

Hi.
I was in similar position with my latest freelance job and I ended up buying a license of World Machine (119$) and 3 months of Speedtree Cinema (200$). Looking at your pictures, I would probably skip worldmachine and just use real world height map:
https://tangrams.github.io/heightmapper ... /-127.6890 like this....
(put it in texturemap and use ICE to push points based on that map)

but for vegetation, I really recommend Speedtree. It saved me days of work and results are much better (more realistic) than what I would achieve in Softimage (with T-Gen probably).
My workflow was to create a hires tree in Speedtree, export 2 huge obj files, one for trunk with branches and the other for leaves. Then create 2 arnold standins, put them in one model and use that in my renders (this way i was able to change materials on them, use ICE attributes for color variations of leaves on the scattered trees etc.)

[Tenshi]

@milan, that´s another solution. Thank you for the advice! I will check out all the stuff people are telling me. Really thanks for the ideas.