SMC#5 - The Lost Jungle - Tree City - behemoth

[behemoth]

Well after a couple hours of tweaking and a day of rendering I think I've come up with something I'm fairly happy with. The leaves are my only complaint at this point. I was hoping they would blend better, none the less, here is my beauty render. I will post wireframe and clay renders tomorrow. Sleep time for me! Good luck everyone!

[chunkymunky]

Superb update! Wonderful

[hulahuga]

Cool The design is really nice and the deck turned out good. Leaves have some odd blur to them, but you said that yourself...


Cool scene

[behemoth]

Well, I think I'm finally done. I struggled some more with the leaves in the beauty render but none the less, I think its an improvement over the previous image (which by the way has been replaced in the earlier post with this new one). I wish everyone good luck as the competition is drawing near. Thanks to everyone for their comments! Its all greatly appreciated!

[chunkymunky]

Well done, looks great, best of luck for the competition

[behemoth]

Thanks chunkymunky! I'm feeling pretty good about how it all turned out. A vote of confidence is always good. I will be updating my modeling methology later today I think to close everything off.

[behemoth]

Okay before I post the new images to the finals page I thought I might outline some of the modeling practises I went through during the process of this piece for the competitions sake. They're outlined as follows along with the timeline for each component:

Tree Trunk (75 minutes) - This was kinda tough because not only was this my central focus for the image but it also was the most detailed object in my planned scene. How I modelled this quickly was simply by using basic modeling practises (same way you would model anything really) with a few tricks. By creating and editing cylinders I was able to reach a desired poly flow to make the bulk of the trunk. Rather than starting from the bottom and building detailed to the top I fleshed out the simple design of each section of the tree and connected everything up as a unit where needed. By using the "Average Vertices" button, I was able to sustain an even flow quickly in areas that caused pinching or weird deformations. Other than that, nothing special here, just lots of extruding and editing verts.

Wooden Plateau Levels (45 minutes) - In a lot ways, the turn out of these stages were more important than the tree itself, so efficient modeling and care was needed here as well. Simple box modeling with bevels were the practises involved in the making of this setup. What really sped me up on both levels when making mutliple planks, bolts, nails and banister pillars was a combination of pivot location with "Duplicate Special" to arrange multiple copies of a particular object in an axis desired.

Mud/Clay Deposit Homes (90 minutes) - The houses really give purpose to the scene so my approach was to make them to be simple but show a degree of uniqueness and odd shape. By creating basic primitives combined with the "Sine" and "Flare" deformers, along with "Smooth" I was able to get a desired look to them. Extrusions were added to finalize the houses inner works and windows.

The Smaller Details (30 minutes) - The other details included the leaves, ladder and just some random tweaks to the tree itself. The leaves were done by Maya's Paint Effects for the most part. I created a tree that seemed to fit best with Paint Effects and converted it's geometry to polygons, seperating it from its leaves. I then resized the geometry for the leaves, duplicated and rotated until it fit my tree. The ladder was literally a very last minute addition which is simple box modeling.

Well, this may have been pointless, but hey lol I really didn't have much to do right now so I kinda wanted to lay out this project's breakdown in this thread in case there was any confusion as to how some of this was done. There's plenty of times I really want to learn how to efficiently model something, or learn new methods of modeling and its harder than it seems to find out what other artists do. So I guess it just felt right to do this lol. Anyway, Good Luck to everyone! Hope you all had fun with this one . Any comments would be excellent.

[chunkymunky]

I think that's great that you've given that breakdown, we all get to learn the process that went into making the artwork This turned out really great, it's so good to see your created something so organic out of normal modelling instead of mudbox and zbrush etc

[hulahuga]

Real good that you've shown us this . Like a mini tutorial. Always good to see the workflows of others..

Scene turned out real cool too

[behemoth]

Thanks chunkymunky and hulahuga! Its awesome to here that the time was well spent to lay out the breakdown. I'm happy enough with the turn out of this one to kinda give everyone a mini tutorial, which I think I may continue to do in the future. Thanks muchly for your comments, they are all very helpful and encouraging. Good luck everyone!