Wisteria

So this one took awhile to think about. I had thought I could just “grow“ vines on the Service house in the BG but the memory cost would just have been way too high since I am going to have to transfer this over the web. So after a lot of thinking I decided on a more modular structure.

Once again this plant was made using the original structure I had set up for the bushes. I provided a shape that would nicely arc from the roof to an overhang and let my system figure out where to put the branches. This actually worked out really well and adding variation was as easy as changing the scatter seed that defined the initial branches.

I made 6 variations in 2 sizes, small and large and hand placed Arnold assets on the service house. The execution of this was really quick, adapted my other setup in a few minutes, added flowers and was pretty much done in an hour!

Banana Leaf Plant

Watch and share Banana TT 01 GIFs on Gfycat

Next piece of foliage I decided to tackle was the Banana leaf plant. My goals were to adapt the palm’s setup to fit my needs and it need to have the tearing that occurs on the leaves when they are first unfurling.

From the palm I was able to keep the trunk and frond setup almost exactly how it is, the majority of the changes were to the leaf system.

Because I wanted to add randomness to the leaves they needed to be added one by one to the fronds so I could introduce the variations based on the frond. The leaves were initially created using the same system as previous the addition of a remesh, for extra detail, and not merging the center points of the mirror.

The reason for not merging was so I could at the leaf splits randomly on either side to break up the shapes even more. The breakup was done using the RBD fracture node with points supplied by a scatter node on the “bone“. After that I measured a bounding box for each part and applied all necessary info to a bend node that would bend each section with a bit of variance.

To get the leaf onto the fronds, I used the “frond bone” (a line) with a randomized carve and the path deform node with a randomized scale. This provided a lot of variation in shapes for the leaves where no leaf could be repeated. The frond and leaf now combined were bent once more using the previous system to simulate gravity, I also included a bit of randomized twist this time.

At this point, I had done some test renders in the scene and found it a bit lacking in depth, I decided to go back to the leaf and add some extra noise to breakup the leaf shape a bit more.

As a final sanity check, I once again brought the model into Marmoset for a quick texture and render to verify the UVs and breakouts were working as I intended.

Cast Iron Arch and Railings

Somewhat small update but one of the more time consuming assets completed. Here are the references and some of the patterns that I used and resculpted.

The process was more or less the same as for the cast iron chair except this time I preplanned the alpha for the archway in Affinity Photo. Doing this was really more of a sanity check than anything because one section of the pattern was used for both the vertical and horizontal pieces.

Like the chair, the plan was to bake the high-poly detail down to a lower poly mesh just for the sake of lowering total scene polycount.

And here the archway is in situ along with a new poly-modeled railing.

Hedges, Lanterns, Trays and Beignets

This update is bit of a mix! Main additions are the hedge beneath the palm tree, lanterns starting to be strung up, the trays, wine bottle and champagne flute (a little hard to see but should look nice once it’s shaded).

My goal for this update was trying to finish up the smaller assets that are spread about that were all pretty quick to make.

The concept is a little non-descript with what food is on the ground, but Tiana’s Beignets were a part of her character and of the party so coming soon will be beignets scattered on the ground to match the concept’s positions. For some fun, I took a short animation into marmoset using alembics and setup a loop to render. It’s a little fast, but a fun experiment!

Watch and share FallingBeignets GIFs by gjanders131 on Gfycat

As for the hedges, they were made using the same setup for the topiaries with a little bit of customization to make it play nice with the larger shape. I also broke up the base shape into pieces for a better, more defined hedge at the end.

Updated Main Scene

With a few more assets ready I updated the main scene and created the table cloths in Marvelous designer. Next plans are to do some more foliage work, some of the smaller props like the food scattered around the ground. Along with that I have the lanterns made, I just need to string them up and position them!

I assure you the BG image matches much better than this, it gets squished when rendered.

Palm Tree

Continuing the theme of foliage I tackled the large palm next. I think I could have gotten away with making one hero palm for this but in case I wanted more or wanted to easily change things I again went with the more procedural route.

Watch and share TT PalmTree 02 GIFs on Gfycat

Using the same leaf system as the topiary, I made a base leaf for the frond and then alternated their spawn on the frond stem. The scale of each leaf was based on the shape of a ramp so I could fine-tune the shape of the frond. I also added controls for changing the direction of the leaves and added some randomness. The white lines visible are the lines each piece originated from, I use these later to control a “gravity“ bend.

The premise of the gravity bend was to have a system that would droop all of the fronds first, then each leaf independently so they have the proper orientation and effect applied. This is done useing the “bones” of each piece to define the start point and distance for the bend to apply.

The palm trunk was pretty straight forward to make, the shape was made based off of a pscale ramp and swept. The leaves were added based on a variety of height and angle controls to get the shape right. Some dead fronds were added hanging off as well to provide a bit more detail.

Once again I had some fun with the final product and brought it into Marmoset again for texturing and a quick render using raytracing.

Topiary

The topiaries seemed like a fun challenge to tackle next. My idea was to make a system in Houdini that I could input any shape I wanted into and get a topiary out of.

The setup works by taking an input point source, ray casts an endpoint onto the input shape as the “trunk” branch group and the same process is looped however many times is wanted to create new sets of branches based on the previous set of branches. This quickly built up the

The leaves were made using a simple Vex ramp setup on a line. To get a little more mesh to use for bending the altered line is duplicated and scaled by half on the short axis and combined with the base line. Using Vex again the leaf is meshed. After that there are 2 bends to control shape, the leaf is mirrored and UVed then sent of to be generated on the branches. The controls I setup for the generation are what branch generation to give leaves and how far up can leaves generate on the branches.

Cast Iron Chair

I had an itch to sculpt and there are a few things in this scene that are made from cast iron, such as the archway and the chairs. Having lived in Savannah, GA I was very familiar with these accents and gathered some reference for the chair. I was able to find some nice studio shots as well as antique sellers with photos.

This seemed like a fun and complex piece to put some effort into. I started with the back and projected on of the more front on images onto a plane in ZBrush as an alpha. This gave me ballpark shapes and outlines but left all of the interior design work to hand sculpting.

This resulted in a very hi-poly model that did not make sense to work with in the scene so the plan was to bake it down to a low res mesh. To save a bit of time the low-poly was made with Zremesher but I plan to go back and properly retopo this to present it as a game-ready asset.

Next up I made the seat and legs based off of the reference images. The seat was made using traditional poly modeling and then dynameshed in ZBrush to make it look welded and cohesive. Then 1/12 was retopoed in Topogun 3, mirrored and the duplicated in a circle, completing the seat. The legs were sculpted in ZBrush and retopoed in Topogun as well.

The high and low poly chairs were assembled in ZBrush and the low was sent to Rizom UV to unwrap, then both were sent to Marmoset Toolbag 4 to bake. On the left you can see the high poly, the middle is low poly with normal map, and the right is the low:

With the bake done I decided to try out Marmoset’s new texturing toolset for fun and got some cool, quick results!

Watch and share TT CastIronChair GIFs by gjanders131 on Gfycat

Layout in UE4

I’ve found that UE4 is a great place to start piecing large scenes like this one together. Initially I built up the architecture of the mansion using Unreal’s brush geo. Once I was satisfied with the initial layout, I exported the static mesh models and rebuilt the building pieces at high detail. This project will be rendered in Maya so I modeled with subdivisions in mind.

The camera is based off an Alexa LF and estimated its position and focal length based off of the concept art. I found later that the concept’s perspective is a bit skewed from the real world so it is a bit looser of a match for now.

The Concept

My friend Mark Mckinsey and I decided to collaborate on an environment piece based on this concept of the Mansion Grounds from The Princess and the Frog. I’m handling all of the modeling and dressing work and he will be texturing, shading and lighting the final composition.

We chose this concept because we liked the colors, composition and the variety of objects and materials.

Concept art by James Finch