Beginnings - Fantasy Environment Vignette

Paravolus

Here's my latest work, "Beginnings" - a fantasy environment vignette created for Andres Rodriguez's 10 week environment art class at CGMA. Assembled in Maya, textured/baked in Substance Designer/Painter, and sculpts done with Zbrush. Rendered in Marmoset 3.

Inspiration for this piece came from: Ireland, Fantasy Genre, Zelda, as well as paintings by Jeremy Fenske https://www.artstation.com/artwork/nLY0K and Rafal Banasiak https://www.artstation.com/artwork/Z05yZ

Shout out to Andres for the course and critiques!

A few more shots on ArtStation here: https://www.artstation.com/artwork/ZWdXw

Bedrock

Very good, wish you had a backdrop tho

EricElwell

Love the atmosphere!

Paravolus

Thanks guys! 

@Bedrock since this was rendered in marmoset I just used a sky from their presets. If I decide to build a bigger scene in UE4 I'll definitely spend some more time on the skybox.

tristamus

Can I ask what your process for the vinery was?

Paravolus

@tristamus Sure!

I created the base heightmap for the ivy leaves in substance designer and then loaded it into Zbrush as an alpha. In the alpha palette there's an option called Make 3D which I used to quickly get my my base shape for the leaf.  Then I sculpted a few more details using Dynamesh and then exported a couple different versions. 



For the vine stems I created a box, subdivided a few times and masked off a few areas where I wanted the vines to grow from. From there I used fibermesh (with a bit of experimentation) to grow the bigger stems first and then the smaller ones on top of that. 



From there I decimated/exported everything and brought it into maya to be placed around. Before placing the leaves, I made a few variants using the bend and twist deformers. For the placing I used the Make Live tool on the vine stems in Maya and duplicated the leaves around on the live objects.



Then, I exported out all of the high poly and a low poly plane to bake things down in substance designer. In designer I baked baked an ID Map, Height, AO, Normal, and Opacity. I used the masks to create my base color and roughness.



Next, I built a few pre-made vine assets that could easily be placed on walls/pillars/etc with the make live tool in maya. I populate a few individual leaves over the tops of the vine cards to add depth and break-up the corners and tops of silhouettes. 



Hope this helps! Cheers!

SlateQ37

nice work man. i know this is a bit of an old one but if i had to say one thing about the final render it'd be that the whole image is quite dark. and by extension the image can come across as a bit flat due to the lack of contrast. but looking at your other work im guessing this was more of a deadline thing, or maybe going for a painterly look?

also, can i ask what expertise your classmates generally had prior to starting the CGMA course? i've been looking at that one myself and am not sure how forgiving it would be.

Paravolus

SlateQ37 said:

nice work man. i know this is a bit of an old one but if i had to say one thing about the final render it'd be that the whole image is quite dark. and by extension the image can come across as a bit flat due to the lack of contrast. but looking at your other work im guessing this was more of a deadline thing, or maybe going for a painterly look?

also, can i ask what expertise your classmates generally had prior to starting the CGMA course? i've been looking at that one myself and am not sure how forgiving it would be.

@SlateQ37
Yeah, looking back on this piece it did turn out quite dark. Mostly, it was time for me to move on to something new and put the pencil down. I may go back at some point and make some changes though. I feel like I got the mood I wanted, but didn't quite nail it. Which happens  

The class had varying levels of expertise in it, but anyone can benefit from it. Getting one-on-one feedback from a really good artist is very valuable.

FreneticPonies

oooh very cool! 

Larry

This is indeed looking very nice but i have one question. Shouldn't there be more dirt/color variation in such an old ruin? :P 

Paravolus

Larry said:

This is indeed looking very nice but i have one question. Shouldn't there be more dirt/color variation in such an old ruin? :P 

@Larry Definitely should be! Since I built this for Marmoset render I didn't use any vertex painting or decals, unfortunately. But you're right it would benefit from it for sure.

beccaanthony003

Just came across this. I'm digging the vibe. I've been looking to take this class and the Vegetation class with Jeremy. 

Just a note, i'm sure you've moved on from this. But if you ever go back to working on this, I'd vary the design of the leaves. Such a minor thing, but they're looking a little too even.