Juvet (House in the Woods 009)
As these side projects tend to go for me, this one took me a while to "finish". Initially I only intended to make Still images, but since I worked on it for almost a year whenever i had the time, my interest in more immersive ways of showcasing enviornments led me to animate the scene - with the main focus beeing on a dynamic wind system to make the forest feel alive.
Tweaking the wind animation and shaders (especially the color palette) on individual plants to be consistent with the scene as a whole was pretty much the most fun part about this and keept me coming back and iterating the scene further.
The biome was created using references found online to keep it believable, eventhough I did some experiments with seasons and other biomes like autumn and pinetrees.
Since this took like 22 days to render, it was denoised heavily to cut down on render time, resulting in some artifacts. Still working to get stuff close to this out of UE4 someday.
Its far from perfect but hey, whatever ;)
Juvet - Animation
Cam02_V037
Not quite how it ended up looking in the end, but the last still frame I did on this shot. This was lit using an HDRI, changed it to FstormSun to cut render times.
Cam04_V034
I like this shot in portrait orientation, shows these ponds quite well. However the look I was aiming for isn´t quite there yet...
Cam05_V031
Didn´t like the overall look yet. Took forever to render...
Cam01_V012
Pretty early on (October 18) - looking back, the ground is way to busy.
Saplings_Wind_V022
Wind animation for small ground plants - I call them saplings :) They come with vertex animation for texture variation (new grown leaves appear brigter) - Done in GrowFX
Ground plants (excl. twigs).
As you can see, there isn´t really that much variation in the foliage for this scene. The scattering masks any visible repetition. All plants done in GrowFX (also the trees not shown here)
Scattering (excl. Trees)
As seen in the previous image, ground plants where divided in basically (...) 3 groups that were distributed seperately, based on noises with no/non visible overlap with the rocks.
i had quite a lot of fun with the backdrop, done in Houdini. There are ALOT of instanced trees here, Forest Pack does the job pretty well imo.
Arrow indicates the Building.
Yeah I know it´s kinda overkill and stuff :D