Tips for Modelling a Forest Environment

stephonatron

Hey, not sure if this is the right place for this thread, but anyways... I have a lot of trouble with environments. I'm fine with modelling individual characters or props, but something about environments just overwhelms me. There are so many things to think about, I don't know where to start, and then I end up never starting at all.

I find myself needing to model a forest environment for a short animation for one of my classes, and I'm kind of stuck. With things like trees and rocks, should I model a few variations and stick them everywhere? Model each individual rock? And then there's all of the plants and grass. Does anyone have any advice on how to approach this? How to plan out the scene?

Thanks in advance for any tips you can share!

YellowYeti

For when i make a scene i usually like to think of the general layout of it first, and give it a shitty quick preview by drawing it in like MSPaint just to give me a feel first. Then i go and try to think of things that could make sense in that scene, like for your forest scene maybe you want to make a little tent with camping gear around it and what not. For the rocks, usually with something that's that small just like you said make a few variations then just turn them over in different directions to give them a new feel(or even paint them differently) infact, although i'm not familiar with any, there might even be a tool that can generate some rocks for you if you search for it, same method applies for the trees.
The picture included is what i was talking about the rough set up which is for a hospital scene im making now, and then i usually go back and tweak it while i'm modeling because i'll get new ideas.
Good luck!:)

Cay

It's probably the fact that you didn't really do most of these things up to this point (or not very often). I'd suggest downscaling this a bit, testing with a small scale scene, and then spreading it out from there. Why not create a small composition with one or two trees and some of the other assets and then go about building the whole forest.

I really can't tell what they expect from you, though.
If it's just a very short sequence you can probably get away with a few assets, the others being out of focus.

stephonatron

Thanks YellowYeti, the shitty MSPaint drawing sounds like a good idea to help me cement the scene layout.

Cay, I think I'm going to take your suggestion of down scaling. Your comment made me realize that I'm getting way ahead of myself and worrying about background detail before I've even started working on the main assets. There are a few trees the character interacts with, so I could probably start with those and go on from there.

The sequence is pretty short, about a minute and a half. We had to make an animatic with our storyboards, might give you a better idea of what my requirements are:
[ame="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yJgqp707Ra0"]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yJgqp707Ra0[/ame]

Eric Chadwick

We have a bunch of resources on the wiki about making landscapes, including forests.
http://wiki.polycount.com/wiki/Foliage
http://wiki.polycount.com/wiki/Landscape
http://wiki.polycount.com/wiki/Environment_Modeling
http://wiki.polycount.com/wiki/Modular_environments