Initial Environment Concept Work

Earlier on, I had this idea of having Angela’s house in a countryside setting, probably somewhere in the middle of the woods. So I did this concept painting to illustrate my lighting scheme:

But I had this discussion with Alan that firstly the environment looks very forbidding – especially the looming jungle at the back. My intention was to emote a very warmly spring feel. Another issue was that if I were to include off screen air raid sirens to indicate war, then a house in the city would be more ideal. So I would be changing that aspect.

Next, I went onto doing a rough concept work for my opening sequence. I knew I had to have a countryside setting with vast fields with grass. I found this to be more of  technical challenge as I thought on how I would be making grass on a large scale without having to slow down the system performance.

I thought about using paint effects, but in my experience, it slowed things down by a lot. I could be wrong – there could be techniques to counter that. But I wasn’t very sure all the same. Thus, I decided to go with a fur approach. This was my first time trying out fur. Here’s what the final comp looks like – more or less:

The scene is kept pretty light actually. I have a NURBS plane which has been sculpted to give a hilly look. I created a shader which had random brown parts as mud and green parts as grass assigned on the hill. Then I created a displacement shader for it such that the brown parts would rise up as rocky or muddy areas and the green part would remain as it is. I also plugged this map into the fur attributes such that the fur would only appear on the green part and the brown part would remain empty.

Turns out that my displacement couldn’t work properly at highest level so I had to optimised it, which is why you can’t see much detail on the brown part. As for the grass, I’m still trying to figure out on how to have it caste shadows on the plane. The background distant mountains and the sky are photographs color corrected and composited into the scene.

I’m continuing to work on this scene more to improve the lighting. I managed to get the displacement working at its full quality without having to sacrifice too much render time. Also, I managed to get the grass moving slightly by connecting it to a dynamic hair system. I’m still working on the set-up of render layers so I will upload once I’m done. For this kind of shot, I’m hoping to keep the render at less than 2 minutes per frame per pass. I hope that’s reasonable for the amount of time I have.