Landscape and forest

Comments on work in progress
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druitre
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Landscape and forest

Post by druitre » 24 Apr 2014, 11:29

Hi guys,

A bit of a cross-post this but as the other forum I posted this in is closed (only for registered RedShift users) I guess that's allright. It’s some of the stuff I’ve been using to test Redshift with these last couple of months, in between paid jobs. Mainly concerning how to build landscapes, outdoors scenery, nature. I'm doing a short and the stuff here is lookdev, tests and such for that.

The short will be done in a mixed fashion, with lots of miniature photography, so my aim is to make my CG look like it’s miniature tabletop stuff. Made out of foam, plastic, clay, cardboard etc. If you want to see more, visit my blog here: http://poorsoil.snackbardesiree.com/blog/

First is a scene that should be a glorious romantic sunset, with an old gnarled oak in a dry and dusty patch of grass. I’ll be adding characters at a later stage but for the moment this is how far I’ve taken it. The only thing added in comp is a separate volumic pass rendered in MR, the rest is a straight render out of RedShift. (Brute force, two bounces, physical sun & sky setup)



Next posts I'll show the scene elements and explain a bit.

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druitre
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Re: Landscape and forest

Post by druitre » 24 Apr 2014, 11:33

Elements of the scene in detail:


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Displacement with a texture map to create the cracked earth, then procedural displacement on the sides to create the internal structure. Incidence on the colors.

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Combined with a groundplane with mixed procedurals (also on displacement) and a tree. Material on the tree uses displacements for the foamy look and ambocc driving fractals to make drybrush/handpainted look.

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Rocks made with very lowpoly geo and mixed procedurals on displacement to create random coarse to fine detail. Colors being driven by displacement through ambocc and mixernodes, with some incidence + fractal stuff to get the lichen/mossgrown tops.
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druitre
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Re: Landscape and forest

Post by druitre » 24 Apr 2014, 11:36

Image
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Same thing on the surrounding groundplane - first some turbulize on the Y to get hilly structure, then lowpoly mountains and rocks, then the RS displacement thing as with the previous example. Here without any textures to show displacement detail.

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The tree is a lowpoly handmodeled affair, with the aforementioned foamlook by mixing displacements with dirtshading (used ambocc shader with mix2color to get that).
The 'leafs' are (as I was trying to recreate a miniature made-out-of-foam thing) simple cubes scattered about the branches, also with that foamdisplacement thing on them.
In the same vein, the spanish moss is pieces of cloth draped over branches then cut into strips.

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druitre
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Re: Landscape and forest

Post by druitre » 24 Apr 2014, 11:40

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Grass is handmodeled very lowpoly, duplicated into small patches. I made several of these, one more damaged/bent grass, one cut short (around the tree, to show the characters are taking care of their playground)
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Also some wildgrass flowers to add variation
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This then scattered, with some weightmaps and incidence filters.
Actually, the grass is a bit too lowpoly for close use, I'll have to place something more detailed close to the camera in my final shot(s).

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owei
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Re: Landscape and forest

Post by owei » 24 Apr 2014, 14:55

Great work, Jasper! Quite inspiring..!! ;)

Thanks for sharing your techniques!!

cheers,
oli

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Draise
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Re: Landscape and forest

Post by Draise » 24 Apr 2014, 18:36

This is beautiful work, and in Redshift! Lovely. I love the style you are getting on, and yes, thank you so much for sharing!

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Re: Landscape and forest

Post by forton » 25 Apr 2014, 09:26

Looks lovely, interesting reading on the website too (if you understand dutch)

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grendizer
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Re: Landscape and forest

Post by grendizer » 27 Apr 2014, 00:06

I really love your work! Very inspiring. is it a personal project?
Do you scater the grass with ICE?
yes, the blog seems nice, I'll try an online translator!

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druitre
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Re: Landscape and forest

Post by druitre » 28 Apr 2014, 10:22

Thanks all! Yes, it's a personal project (or rather the CG spinoff of another personal project). Doing everything CG on my own, with a friend helping me out in the design department.

The scattering is all Milan Vasek's Scattertools, customized here and there. Small pebbles and rocks were done by letting them drop with momentum... that results in a perfect distribution on uneven underground, as gravity can do what it would do in real life.

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grendizer
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Re: Landscape and forest

Post by grendizer » 28 Apr 2014, 11:31

Thanks for the info. I'm curious about how you achieve the miniature effect. I guess you use Depth of Field, with a very narrow clear (non-blurry) range?

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druitre
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Re: Landscape and forest

Post by druitre » 28 Apr 2014, 15:53

Yes, shallow depth of field and non-natural materials (my 'wood' is more like foamplastic painted like wood. Looking at miniatures made out of simple materials like cardboard, clay, foam etc for reference)

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druitre
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Re: Landscape and forest

Post by druitre » 02 May 2014, 16:31

Here an update: I recently got 3D Quaker's Forester plugin, which was released just when I was finishing up on my scene, as it does a lot of the stuff I need for my landscapes. And in a more elegant way than what I was doing, mainly with respect to procedural trees that have animation on them. Very good for one of the other shots I have in mind, this one in a lush forest, filled with trees, foliage, grass, flowers etc. Kind of the opposite of my bleak and dry previous one.

I still could use a lot of the stuff from the other scene, the displaced ground and rocks for instance, and the foam-materials. Much faster workflow:

the ground plane, with the material from my other scene tweaked to be dark, moist forest ground.
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the rocks - forester has a rock-scatter compound that I used to make the basic scatters, and then I tweaked it a bit and used my materials from the other scene, with more topmoss:
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all the grass is Forester, it's really versatile and animates as well. I have three different layers of grass and one tweaked to look like cloverleafs
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two types of forester-generated tree, scattered also with forester, and custom vines added to the stembases
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All of which took me about a week to do, including tweaking a lot to get my set dressed the way I wanted it and also including lighting. Not a lot of texturing on the trees though and not yet customized to get my miniature-look. I'll do that later.

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druitre
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Re: Landscape and forest

Post by druitre » 02 May 2014, 16:42

close up on the center stage, where I'll put my characters, and where I did the most customization in terms of setdressing and light.

I made a small dell
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and modeled the rocks there to be a bit more interesting
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used weightmaps and volume modifiers to keep it more open, less grassy
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same for the trees
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and with light properly set - I want to have a Gustave Doré-type of dark-light-dark staging. I also added flowers, this scene is supposed to be much more positive and romantic in tone than the first
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druitre
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Re: Landscape and forest

Post by druitre » 02 May 2014, 16:49

couple more renders of the center stage:

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druitre
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Re: Landscape and forest

Post by druitre » 02 May 2014, 17:16

And very WIP, one of my characters added:

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Volumic light rendered in MR, added in comp:
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nDman
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Re: Landscape and forest

Post by nDman » 02 May 2014, 22:50

This is very nice work :ymapplause:

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