Environment – Nira's VFX Blog

For this week, I modelled variations of palm trees and foliage to fill up the scene and make it look more like a rainforest.

Palm trees references & models

I needed a palm tree reference that was not too tall, with a thick trunk, and with some coconuts showing in between the leaves. I think this style will suit best my scene as the pyramid will need to stand out in the final long shot above the jungle, so it would be better to keep the palm trees at around the same high as the trees are. I found the below references with similar characteristics I had in mind:

The palm leaves were made using the same technique I used for the tree leaves previously. I created an alpha and a normal maps in Photoshop from a picture of a palm tree leaf I found online, and then linked them in Maya.

Foliage models

These are some references I took as inspiration to create the foliage to fill up the rainforest scene:

Big leaves reference (Jorge Castillo, Lucas Bustamante, Frank Pichardo, 2022)

I also made the alpha and normal maps in Photoshop for the foliage leaves, to then link them to plane shapes in Maya.

Additions of new models to environment

Once I finished the models, I placed them in the main environment scene to see how would they look. I also used referencing in Maya, so when I add the textures to the original models, it would update in the main scene too so I do not need to place everything again.

I also had some problems trying to see the textures of the trees leaves in the main scene when I switched from my personal computer to the university computers. Researching in forums online, I found out that when .ass extensions files were exported, these needed to be exported without ‘Absolute texture paths’ option ticked, as it would always take as reference the same path assigned originally, so when changing computers, these will not show. I reexported these as mentioned before, and relinked the assets with a ‘relative path’ so it does not have a fixed route.

Render settings to remove absolute paths from .ass files

References

Castillo, J., Bustamante, L., Pichardo, F. (2022). Why is Ecuador the best tropical country for nature photography? (online). Available at: https://www.tropicalherping.com/articles/why_ecuador_for_photography.html [Accessed 3 June 2023]

Gerisima (2020). Coconut Palm trees on white sandy beach in Punta Cana, Dominican Republic. stock photo (online). Available at: https://www.istockphoto.com/photo/coconut-palm-trees-on-white-sandy-beach-in-punta-cana-dominican-republic-gm1270732523-373579722 [Accessed 3 June 2023]

Lubilub, 2009). Beautiful palm trees by River Dulce in Livingston, Guatemala. stock photo (online). Available at: https://www.istockphoto.com/photo/beautiful-palm-trees-by-river-dulce-in-livingston-guatemala-gm117952546-9032250 [Accessed 3 June 2023]

Nurjuwita, D. (2018). Where to travel in 2018: The best rainforest destinations (online). Available at: https://www.lifestyleasia.com/sg/travel/travel-2018-best-rainforest-destinations/ [Accessed 3 June 2023]

This week I managed to finish all trees models using MASH to place leaves repetitions, and also placed all trees in the environment.

Leaves arrangement using MASH tool in Maya

Since I realised that arranging all leaves manually would take longer that I expected, I decided to look for an alternative and quickest way. Then I found this tutorial on how to use MASH ‘Distribute’ and ‘Placer’ nodes to ‘paint’ an object over a mesh.

MASH tutorial (Ian Waters, 2017)

With the ‘Distribute’ node in MASH, I created the repetitions of the leaves arrangements I designed previously. Also, I made sure to set my MASH ‘Geometry type’ to ‘Mesh’ and not to ‘Instancer’, since this way the alpha map of the leaves will be kept and I will be able to keep the leaves texture. Then, in the ‘Distribute’ node, I set the ‘Distribution type’ to ‘Mesh’ and linked the tree as the ‘Input Mesh’ (so it follows the shape of the tree), and left the ‘Number of points’ as ‘0’ in this case. Then, I used a ‘Placer’ node so I could place the leaves pattern like painting with a brush on top of the tree. With this node I made some tweaks in its setting so the leaves were generated with random position, rotation and scale. Lastly, in order to preserve the leaves texture when exporting the trees with the MASH generated repetitions to the environment scene, I exported them in .ASS extension.