Last week, I finally finished a project I’ve been poking at for an hour or two here and there over the last year. It was a sort of modest attempt at making something for myself instead of for a client, which I rarely had the time or inclination to do while working as a production artist, and an excuse to learn Redshift3D, which is a fantastic GPU renderer. I’m pretty obsessed with rain, growth processes, and the north coast of California in general, so doing a forest scene seemed like it would cover all the necessary bases. I also wanted to try to make the scene as procedurally-driven as possible, and I suppose it’s *mostly* procedural, aside from a few textures and the hero plant simulation. Here’s the final product:
rainy forest cinemagraph from Toadstorm Inc on Vimeo.
The next few posts on the nerdblog here will be describing some of the processes used in creating this scene. I tried to keep things as organized and as procedural as possible, though of course in practice there are always going to be loose ends and corners cut. Some caveats before I start:
- The scene scale is totally screwed up. Yes, I know, noob mistake.
- There are a lot of caches. These sort of grew organically so that I could iterate on things faster. The /out/ context has a dependency chain that probably will cook all these dependencies, but I’m not guaranteeing it will work perfectly as-is. Sorry.
- It was dumb to use RS Sprite on extruded geometry. I mostly got away with it, but it doesn’t hold up well up-close around the edges.
- I may have forgotten a dependency in the .ZIP file I uploaded. It’s certainly possible and honestly likely that something is missing, and in this case please let me know so that I can include it.
Okay. With that out of the way, here’s the HIP file and some textures: rain_leaves.zip
Now, onto Part 1: The Stump and Moss.
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