Fir Tree - Environment Remake

Work In Progress / 27 October 2019

Hi Everyone!

About three years ago I made a small environment based off a concept by Juliya Revina! To test how far my skills have come since then I thought this would be a good project to remake and document my process here.

I knew the first thing I had to do was put my old piece side by side with the concept and figure out how I could improve it, not only to be more accurate, but overall more appealing.

Once having them together, I immediately saw parts I knew could be improved.

  • My textures were blury
  • I found I faked parts of the render by painting over the final in small areas (the fade on the ground, the glow, and the grass)
  • The rendering order on the transparency was messed up
  • Shapes were off on the foliage
  • Most ground clutter was missing

My old version is what I would consider a mess.

I started my remake by taking in the old tree trunk into ZBrush as a base. Everything else was to be remade from scratch.

I finalised a rough sculpt of what I wanted, baked, processed my maps, and started painting starting with the trunk to get a feel of where I was heading with the style.

In the end I settled on a result I was happy with and moved on to the mushrooms. Initially I had issues with getting something that felt right to me. I ended up with something I was somewhat happy with. I will likely still play with this before finishing as they currently stick out a bit too much.

Just with what I've made so far my scene is already more "alive" and more interesting. Making this so far has been really enjoyable to see my improvement! It's insprired me to keep going and I can't wait to start all the foliage!