Small test project with a few goals in mind:
1 – make something pretty.
2 – vegetation: render efficiently using proxies.
3 – hero vegetation: learn zbrush, again.

There’s always more to explore, but all things considered I’m pretty happy.

Reference

Erick Pangilinan made an excellent point about using reality as a base for great environments, but also taking creative freedom to make it more interesting. Here for example, I really like this garden at my old apartment complex, but the tree looks a little puny. I wanted to focus on the tree and the lighting that occurs when the sun begins to lower. Bonsai trees are far more interesting as a starting point.

Hero Tree

Now, here’s some screenshots of the hero tree sculpt in zbrush. Zspheres were totally awesome for this, even though I didn’t have the need to take advantage of zsketching. I saved out the level 1 base mesh and displaced the tree back in Maya. Zbrush has really improved since the last time I used it, as the process was seamless. Even going back and forth to clean up the UVs took virtually no time.

Vegetation

I opted to use Maya’s artist friendly paintFX, although I would love to use a dedicated tool like speedtree. PaintFX is limited, but flexible enough to be sufficient in my case. Here are some shots of what I was working with in Maya, and a few proxy objects I saved out to mi files:

Look Development

Color Correction

On this project, I quickly reached the point where the lighting, color, and overall look were getting close in Maya, but switching over to compositing was the only way to iterate quickly and adjust the post process effects. My favorite result here was that I got a lot of the texture detail back from the walls that was previously almost unnoticeable.

Render Stats

• 14.7 Million polygons
• 1914MB max memory usage
• FinalGather on
• 3-5 minutes render time per frame
• Image output was [beauty + 10 masks + depth] (one render layer).

render stats:
RC   0.2  info : rendering statistics
RC   0.2  info :   type                           number   per eye ray
RC   0.2  info :   eye rays                      1911283          1.00
RC   0.2  info :   transparent rays              1561440          0.82
RC   0.2  info :   reflection rays                819206          0.43
RC   0.2  info :   refraction rays                608270          0.32
RC   0.2  info :   shadow rays                  12565839          6.57
RC   0.2  info :   environment rays               647892          0.34
RC   0.2  info :   finalgather rays              1181011          0.62
RC   0.2  info :   probe rays                   17343370          9.07
RC   0.2  info :   fg points interpolated       16912678          8.85
RC   0.2  info : on average 27.12 finalgather points used per interpolation
PHEN 0.2  progr: writing image file projects/garden/images/Beauty/renderCam3.0132.exr (frame 132)
RC   0.2  progr: rendering finished
RC   0.2  info : wallclock  0:03:42.88 for rendering
RC   0.2  info : allocated 1261 MB, max resident 1914 MB
GAPM 0.2  info : triangle count (including retessellation) :    14733195
PHEN 0.2  info : Reflection rays skipped by threshold: 1123248
PHEN 0.2  info : Refraction rays skipped by threshold: 27927
Scene scenes\garden_render.mb completed.

Renders

2011 raw render vs the comp output:

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