Forest drive

[digitalguru]

Here's a few WIP stills from a planned animation.
Heightfield is from Gaea 1.3, terrain rendered in Terragen and truck and all flora rendered in Maya/Arnold.
Still some work to do - just about to get into Houdini to sim some exhaust smoke and a muddy pool for the truck to drive through.

 

 


 

[Dune]

Very realistic. It all falls into place nicely. Nice lighting, etc I like your heather too, btw. Is this for a commercial?

[digitalguru]

Very realistic. It all falls into place nicely. Nice lighting, etc I like your heather too, btw. Is this for a commercial?

Thanks Dune, it's my first attempt at such a plant heavy scene. I used a lot of variations for the trees and heather (64 in total! going back to our population chats) Lighting was mainly moving trees around to get some nice pools of light.
Not for a commercial, but it's a good compliment. It started as I'm learning Houdini and I wanted a a scene where a vehicle drives through mud and this seemed like a good environment to put it in, so that's the next thing to do. Just worked out my render times for this and it will take roughly 45 days to render on a single machine (for about 380 frames), so the final animation might take some time coming

[Dune]

Wow, 45 days. I'd very much like to see that animation... in due time. The perfection is often in detail, and that may take quite some time to get right.

[digitalguru]

I'd very much like to see that animation

So would I it might take longer - sampling is low-ish a.t.m and will take longer with motion blur

The perfection is often in detail

Yes, I think maybe the ground is too "clean" - needs more forest debris perhaps. Is there anything you think might be missing?

[Dune]

Some broken branches perhaps, some dead leaves, a discarded rusty can? A few scattered will probably already give enough illusion, and take the attention off any 'cleanliness'. Will you use some subtle DOF? That will probably even make it more believable (though slower).

[digitalguru]

Yes, I've got some broken branches in the works. Leaves too, but I've got to figure out how to do atlases. Don't know about a rusty can though, scene is pretty idyllic - a can might be considered social comment . Scene will have some DOF, but that comes for free as I'm rendering with deep EXRs.

[Dune]

I don't know if atlas will work in TG. You mean having a single obj (plane or something?) with different textures? You could perhaps diversify the texture by using a world RGB grid, masking 3 default shaders, but that needs some experimentation.
Scatter function of a few obj's would be really cool to have.

[digitalguru]

I don't know if atlas will work in TG. You mean having a single obj (plane or something?) with different textures? You could perhaps diversify the texture by using a world RGB grid, masking 3 default shaders, but that needs some experimentation.
Scatter function of a few obj's would be really cool to have.

Yes, TG needs a more advanced population scatter, maybe in TG5...

[pokoy]

TG really needs some new (and extensive) scatter functionality, it blows my mind a little that there were no substantial improvements in that area.

Looking forward to the animation!

[Matt]

Looking forward to it! If I may, it seems quite underexposed. Will it be brighter after comp?

[digitalguru]

It's meant to be fairly low key, but I'll need to get some more contrast in the final. To some extent it's driven by the IBL I'm using for the lighting and far b.g.

Taking my inspiration from these stills in this Dodge Ram promo video:


 

[masonspappy]

Nicely done!!