The Silent Call of the Mountains
Project and Area of Interest:
Hello, I have been deeply interested in Environmental Designs for a while. Recently, I have been working on various environmental animations, and for my latest project, I decided to create something a bit more complex. In this animation, I aimed to add uniqueness by incorporating a scene of a meteor falling and designing a dense sky.
Used Software and Tools
I utilized Houdini, Gaea, Cinema 4D, Octane, and After Effects for this project. Initially, I gathered reference images, mountains, and various vegetation to create the envisioned environment.
Detailed Process and Techniques
After creating the environment with Gaea, I exported the necessary maps and textures (height, mesh, normal map, and soil texture). When it came to trees, I used SpeedTree to categorize these elements into three groups: low, mid, and high poly. This was a preference I made due to the need for optimization in such a large scene. With Rebelway's meteor training series, I created the meteor and integrated it into my scene using Octane VDB in Cinema 4D by converting it from voxel to VDB.
Rendering Process and Results
With HDRI and lights, I created shadows using a plane and a noise map because I needed cloud shadows. The rendering time took a total of 27 hours (300 frames, 30 fps). I also obtained 6 different layer outputs. Particularly, the z-depth map played a crucial role in my scene. Using stock sky and fog elements, I performed matte painting to create clouds in the sky. Later, I stabilized it with 3D camera tracker and motion tracker, and this process took a total of 2 weeks. I'm looking forward to your valuable comments on this work. Thank you in advance.
