Bamboo Forest

Bamboo Forest

 

Modelling the bamboo forest was probably the easiest task. Simple cylinder and planes to shape up the bamboo and leaves. Texture them in Photoshop and duplicate them to fill the scene. All I did was changing them in size and shape to make them look as natural. The rocks were done using cubes, and sculpted them using the Maya's Sculpt Geometry Tool. The hard part was to uv map them as evenly to avoid texture stretching. I found ZBrush has a very good plugin called the UV Master. A very simple, fast and accurate uv map generator with least effort. A one minute process instead of 15 mins in Maya. I then painted the rock texture in Mudbox as this is object is organic. I mentioned in previous post that painting organic textures using 2D Painting program like Photoshop is not accurate.

 

 

The ground plane is just a simple texture of tiny rocks and grass. Just a simple y-planar projection. I also create a 'gobo' in Photoshop, a simple 'Scattered Maple Leaves' brush painted randomly on the uv map in solid black (different sizes and opacity ) and saved the file in png format. This format with transparency with let light through in the Maya scene but cast shadows on the ground.

I did a quick render and was quite happy with the outcome. Got all the details needed and it rendered in just 40 secs with just one single 'directional' light.

 

 

Finally I turned on the 'gobo' and did another render and got the 'fake shadows' I wanted. This method gives nice soft shadows and won't make the scene becomes dark. The background will be replaced with a matte painting and the compositing will be done in After Effects with extra layer of fog in-between to give depth to this scene. This scene is rendered using Mental Ray and Ray-Trace shadow. I encountered a minor problem as shadows from part of the plane (the leaves and gobo that has transparency) were casted on the ground and rocks. Did some research and able to fix it up in the Attribute Editor (material section/raytrace options) where I turn the setting in the 'shadow attenuation' way done to 0. This resulted in clean shadows casted on the other objects. This however increase the render time but the effect is worthwhile.