With my character rig ready to animate, we desperately needed environment assets and to start arranging them into an actual environment for our animation. I quickly made a more developed blockout than that of the assets I made for our 3D pre-vis. I offered to work on the environment assets as I thought I would be able to complete it really quickly, seeing as I have the most experience with modelling + texturing and being able to do it under pressure in a short amount of time. I thought using the curve and extrude tools + the twist attribute of the extrude tool would be good for creating some spooky twisted trees. I couldn’t quite get the twist to work as I wanted so I watched this video on making rope in Maya which helped get the results I wanted. You could probably achieve this with the new sweep mesh tool but this was a method I was already familiar with. I kept the blockout of these final assets very rough as I intended to fix them up by sculpting them in Blender.
I brought in my character rig to help with the environment scale.
Once I was happy with the number/variation of assets and the composition I exported the assets so I could sculpt them in Blender. Once I finished sculpting all of the assets I exported/imported them back into Maya so I could retopo them. To save time I used Maya’s Reduce, Remesh and Auto Retopo tools and I think they gave pretty good results. To make sure everything successfully baked in Substance I made the high poly versions of the assets live so I could use Mesh > Conform so they could be as close to the original high poly as possible.
Screenshots of the final sculpts in Blender
High Poly to Low Poly bake of the shrine asset in Substance Painter
All of the assets baked really well in substance which I was really happy about, as I was able to quickly move onto texturing, which was extremely important with the amount of time we had left to start character animation and then move onto rendering.
Final Textured Assets in Substance Painter
I used my usual workflow/approach for texturing using fill layers/ masks and generators (curvature, position, etc) to get a stylised look for the environment. Adding a stylised light filter at the end was great to finish off the stylised look very quickly and saved a lot of time.
Final Assets in Maya
Final Scene (from the perspective of my shots)
I provided my group with a Maya scene with the assets placed out in a line so they could see them individually and import the assets they wanted as necessary for their environment. I also provided them with a copy of the environment I created for my shot which I think would also be a good base for their scenes as well, they would just have to duplicate trees + other assets as necessary to fill in the empty spaces. I positioned the assets in a way that looked good from the camera angle of my shots but the other shots of the animation would have different camera angles, revealing empty space. I also provided them with my lighting setup so our shots would stay consistent.
All objects have an aiStandardSurface shader applied to them.