Project brief:
This project focuses on the pipeline of digital environments using procedural methods which must feature an ancient castle in the background and a greenscreen character in the foreground. All the procedural elements were done in Houdini and compositing after in NukeX. We used a mixture of 3D elements and 2.5D projection in Nuke to cut down on unnecessary render times while still obtaining the detail of the 3D object.
Here is the final result:
Breakdown
For my scene I chose to create a landscape on the beach with a rugged and noise heavy coastline. My first idea involved creating a dark and moody atmosphere which had a castle in the distance and my character standing on the edge of a cliff, I wanted to show that the environment was stormy and cold. The location that mostly caught my interest was a beach with a rocky coastline and a calm shore, showing the slow erosion of the land. When collecting reference, I was looking for different elements that I liked and that I could combine to make my digital matte paint.
This is my digital matte painting:
Using VDBs to a box to get an interesting base shape then layering noise to get all the detail and roughness that were accurate to my references
Mask by feature was used more effectively when it came to texturing, randomly spreading moss across the rock worked well and I was able to layer my textures efficiently.
The castle and bridge were done in a similar way where I scattered bricks all over a model of a bridge or castle and changed the the way the normal were facing to make it flow around the objects. To create the broken off areas I used booleans to remove sections using a procedural rock to give it more of a natural feel
To scatter rocks along the sand I used an RBD sim to make them fall in a realistic way, then freezing the frame and caching out the result.
