Environment

Alright so I've been a little lazy updating this page but I have been busy producing assets for the short film. Today I'm going to show a little of how I tackle the task of creating an environment. First and foremost you have to decide what kind of environment its going to be, whether its a forest, underwater, mountain, tundra, or what have you. Once we decided that we wanted this story to take place on an alien world in a desert like environment we started brainstorming. The hardest part of creating a desert environment is that a desert is usually bereft of life and vegetation so you have to come up with other ways of making the environment interesting. So I started with a couple of thumbnails and chose one I liked and did a quick redraw of what I was thinking.

This is what we decided to stay on. A very rocky canyon type of environment. The rocks would give us a lot of options in populating the environment with visual interest. As well as be used for hiding seems in the environment since the canyon would have to be broken into pieces to make it easier for the wide range of machine this project will be created on to run it smoothly.

Once I had that down I created a poly plane and shapped the canyon out. Once I had the canyon shape I like I boke of the plain in even sections so that I could focus on each section as well as make it easier to normal map the canyon later if we so choose. As I made random cuts and and extrudes to give the feeling of rocks eventually you get to a point where the default smoothing groups don't give a good idea of whats going on so I reassign each objects smoothing so that I can see what they actually look like. I than moved onto the spires which I created from a cylinder to start with and than tackled them much Like I did the walls. Finnally ending with small rocks and boulders to clutter up the scene with. Than Lawrence set up a nice mentalRay lighting setup which we used to render out some previews of what the untextured environment will look like