Mountain Range

My first task was populating the image with trees located in places that made sense, around a lake and not on the slopes of the mountain. For this I tried using Mash that is built into Maya and tried out the influencer option. The influencer allowed me to place an area I wanted populated with trees, so I placed these areas around the lake and up towards the camera bringing more depth to the image. There was a huge problem with this approach, resources. For the influencers to work I needed to populate the entire mesh with millions of trees which it would then only display the trees in the areas I designated. However, every time I turned the trees off to work or loaded up the Maya file, it would have to generate the millions of trees again only to ignore hundreds of thousands of them and only display what I told it to causing immense lag and system resources. Another major problem was that if two of the area's, I wanted trees to appear in, overlapped their values would be combined so a tree only 4 meters tall would become 8 meters.

World Creator let me create a scenic view that I could add to and use as a basis.

Once I had my textured mesh and cut it down so that only what was visible existed, for better optimisation, I grabbed the back porch I had built for the Old Man animation I made and utilised it as a foreground object.

My first task was populating the image with trees located in places that made sense, around a lake and not on the slopes of the mountain. For this I tried using Mash that is built into Maya and tried out the influencer option. The influencer allowed me to place an area I wanted populated with trees, so I placed these areas around the lake and up towards the camera bringing more depth to the image. There was a huge problem with this approach, resources. For the influencers to work I needed to populate the entire mesh with millions of trees which it would then only display the trees in the areas I designated. However, every time I turned the trees off to work or loaded up the Maya file, it would have to generate the millions of trees again only to ignore hundreds of thousands of them and only display what I told it to causing immense lag and system resources. Another major problem was that if two of the area's, I wanted trees to appear in, overlapped their values would be combined so a tree only 4 meters tall would become 8 meters.

This is not the correct Tree or Grass map but is a simple one I used for another project. The black is where grass was generated and the white is where nothing is generated.

I ended up abandoning the influencers in favour of a map-based system where Mash would only generate trees in locations that the map had the white colour (Tree map). The pain with this was that if I wanted to change the placement of trees, I'd have to open the map in Photoshop, change it and export it again and reload the image in Maya to see the change. However, this system only generated thousands of trees in places I wanted and would be almost instantaneous when turning the trees on and off to work on other things and be light on system resources.

I have modelled a few trees in Maya using the tree generator built in, which is rubbish. In looking around I found that blender had a better implementation of a tree generator so I decided to spend an afternoon learning it and creating several different fern trees for the scene and possible later use in projects. I imported a few of these trees and had Mash instance them and places them around the scene via a map I created. Instancing allows hundreds, thousands or millions of items/objects to appear in a scene while taking up an incredibly small amount of resources. Rather than copying an object thousands of times all it does it creates location data for where the object should be placed the creates, basically, a hologram of the object. (Copying Object '1' creates Object '2', '3', '4', '5', '6', '7', etc. Instancing creates Markers '1', '2', '3', '4', '5', '6', '7', etc at which Object 1 will appear.

Once I added the trees, gave them random rotations and random height I moved on to the grass which I have made several different models of before. I imported a few different models and settled on the one in the final image. I did try and use the influencer system again but again ran into

the same limitations and problems so created a second 'Grass' map for Mash to generate grass in.

I needed variety or the scene looked too bland. I found some great models of weeds and foliage on https://polyhaven.com/models so used the same 'Grass' map and had Mash generate thousands of ferns, nettles, bushes, dandelions, and dead sticks. This added even more depth to the image by creating more chaos. I also copied some trees rather than instance them so I could better control them for the foreground to add some more layers to the image. Foreground, Subject, Background.

I imported the two spheres I had created for my first 3D animation in 2016, from the Alone short film, and placed them in the middle to almost complete the image. This was more an idea of creating a constant between all my renders, a staple of sorts.

I wanted some fog for the valley so I imported a set of VDB's I had created using EmberGen and then spent too long finding the best look but also something that would not increase my render time from 10 mins to hours. I did the same with the clouds. I created them with EmberGen and placed them above the mountain, though I did want them going through it but it never looked good so settled for above.

After some skybox textures, rendering optimisation, lighting, scene changes and object movements I created something I like, especially for the first time.