Making of Australian Forest

by Sergey Ferley

Hi all. I’m really grateful to be on the list of winners. A lot of competitors did such a fantastic job, very detailed and with great concepts. Congrats to all winners and participants!

I would like to give you a short vision of how I prepared the Australian forest entry.

Few weeks after the announcement of the challenge, I came up with the idea of a glass cabin in a forest. Of course, it’s not new, but I had a specific idea about an Australian forest.

I remembered our first trips around Sydney, nights were full of sounds, a forest full of creatures.

So, I imagined the short story and drew a sketch in photoshop. It took an hour to get the atmosphere that I liked.

For the graphic, I was genuinely inspired by cabins illustrations from Philip Jodidio so beautifully done by, French Illustrator, Marie-Laure Cruschi. Later this first sketch really helped me to build a holistic atmosphere in whole set images.

The Forest

Already at this point, I understood that it won’t be epic, no vast areas of land and far perspectives with dramatic skies. I had some doubts to move to something in the mountains, but the first sketch and reaction on it on the challenge page did the job. So, I decided that I should focus on a feeling of atmosphere/mood of the specific forest and stick to the sketch.

Forest References

I went through my photos from last campings, and through lots of them on the internet. I ended up with a dozen of them as an inspiration for the forest. Some of them are here below.

I was interested in shapes of trunks, types of smaller plants growing there, and little details like leaves, branches, rocks on the ground. And of course animals.

The Assets

I used different 3d models for this scene. 3d rocks and plants, textures for the ground are from Megascan, as well as small objects like stones and branches on the forest terrible.

Leaves and debris on the ground I made from Megascans atlases.

The Trees

All trees in the scene are Eucalyptus. I used SpeedTree to create the trees. It was beneficial to watch tutorials from SpeedTree because I used it for the first time.

Then I found some textures for the trunks and branches and utilized leaves from Megascans atlases. I didn’t succeed to go even close to the real examples. But on this stage I expected all renderings to be night, so basically, I was focused on the trunks shapes to make them close to references as much as possible.

In the end, I got some grown up trees and some young ones for the lover part of the forest.

I used Forest Pack to scatter vegetation and objects on the very base ground. A few splines to configure zones of scattering and a spline to make a path to the cabin.

Trees were scaled a lot on this stage, especially vertically, to achieve a feeling from the first sketch.

The Cabin

I love the shape of the Sea Star cabin from Architectural Prescription. It’s simple and expressive at the same time, so I took it as a reference for my glass cabin.

Apparently, the modeling was fundamental, in my concept the cabin itself should be very subtle and transparent, better if you do not feel it as an object at all. So I decided not to go crazy with detailing.

In the very end, my cabin is just a glass wall. Just a few things inside, wooden podium where to sleep, simple table, fireplace, and lights. I never thought about a realistic architectural solution for the cabin, it’s just a raw concept in a shape that will fit the initial sketch.

Light & Materials

All is very simple. For the night shot, I didn’t have any HDRI, just standard Corona Renderer sky with changed settings and Corona Renderer Sun with very low intensity.

Two Corona Renderer lights in the cabin to imitate light from the fireplace and a gas lamp.

Materials were simple as well.

Nothing specific, but one thing… I rendered two different materials for the glass to mix them in photoshop. At some point, I liked one of the options with “milky” glass, that I got in one of the composition tests.

So for final rendering, I decided to mix it with transparent one which was made with some dirt marks on it.

On to post now 😊

Post Production

Post-production was very important in term of creating a story. It was essential to finish the idea of fear and excitement, by creating a man inside the cabin and wild animals around him.

All these elements were added in Photoshop. Except for man in a sleeping bag for the Interior view.

It would be quite challenging to find or make a photo with such a specific light and camera position. So I took a rigid model of a person and made a sleeping bag in Marvelous Designer, just for this camera. Again, entirely a simple 3D, just enough to get the right feeling.

Here is RAW and Post process in photoshop.

And the interior.

The 360 VR

Regarding 360 images, everything is standard, I just used integrated spherical panorama viewer in photoshop to integrate some wildlife in the image.

I really wanted to give a feeling of the Australian forest, so I mixed some audio from youtube in two short tracks, and Yulio team kindly agreed to let me use this functionality in VR for the challenge.

Visit the YulioVR

I think this was a last point on the way to achieve the final result 😊

The Cabin Challenge has brought me a significant experience of working with tools that were new for me. Such a Megascan, Corona Render and SpeedTree. And It was a pleasure for me to be in the Australian forest for this few months!

Thanks to all!

Making of Inside Out

by Jamie Holmes

1. Nature – Above
   • Cliffs
   • Trees and Plants
   • Beach
2. Nature – Below (Underwater)
   • Water
   • Sealife
   • Corals
   • Shipwreck
3. Cabin
   • Design
   • Modeling
   • Texturing

And after all that I’ll cover the overall :

• Lighting
• Rendering
• Post Production

Let’s start then!

3d Modeling

To be honest, my idea grew as I progressed with the scene. I work organically, always trying different things quickly. I like to focus on the bigger picture first and add details as I go. Having said that I still follow a basic formula where I model all the significant elements and build upon those.

The first item I modeled adequately was the surrounding cliff faces. I sketched the basic shape in 3dsMax and then took it into ZBrush to sculpt the details. I tried a few techniques before I settle on using some rock alpha brushes created by JROTools.

These brushes helped to create a more realistic rock look a lot quicker than manually sculpting the mesh.

The seabed and water are just basic poly modeling with a turbosmooth modifier applied.

Textures

The three main textures in the scene are the cliffs, the sand, and the water.

Cliff Texture

The texture I created for the cliff is a mixture of a standard Megascans texture (Rock Jagged) with a procedural gradient ramp map I created to make the cliff walls look like they have an eroded look with a definite edge where they meet the water.

Sand Texture

The sand texture is pretty simple too. It is made up of a few noise maps and then has various mask bitmaps I painted in Photoshop to differentiate between wet sand and dry sand. I have a displacement modifier for where the sand is softest.

Water Texture

I spent an obscene amount of time on the water during this project, mostly playing with the shader in Corona, but also playing with the seabed model to make sure I was getting an exact depth change with color and visibility both above and below the surface. The shader, after all, is so simple. It just needed a lot more adjusting per shot compared to the other shaders in the scene.

Trees & other Plantings

The trees and plants in my entry are modeled in Exlevel GrowFX apart from a few smaller models from Megascans and the Palm Trees from another, 3rd Party, asset maker. I like GrowFX – once you have made a tree you are happy with, you can create many different variations at the click of a button. I have been using it for years, but I am still to master a perfect tree model.

Its simple to use but challenging to get the tree you want but the resources are great from their website & forum.

This here is a prime example of amazing artists in our industry sharing invaluable knowledge.

Here is the shader I created for the trees. I find that these sometimes need to be tweaked based on the light direction and viewing angle. Usually the translucency and reflection. Not Overly complicated – just slotting in the Megascan maps in their corresponding slots.

The Forest

I can’t mention the trees without mentioning the forests component. All my trees are placed using iToo Software’s Forest Pack except a couple here and there. In fact, all the underwater plants, small stones, and debris on the beach and underwater are all placed using Forest Pack.

The נeach or sand is another element I spent a bit of time on mostly trying to get the colors right and painting the various masks for the transitions of wet to drying to dry.

I started with an underlying mesh and then turbo-smoothed it, so I could add some subtle noise displacement but quickly realized that wouldn’t work with the water’s edge. The waters edge required the sand mesh to be completely flat all the way around, so I didn’t have the water mesh crashing through the sand mesh. I made sure I had a suitable plane to sit the water on with some subtle variation in the waters edge.

Because I only rendered the underwater scenes in VR, I created a tube container that the camera sat in so that when you rotated in any direction, you had the fog effect. A Corona Renderer Volume material was applied to this container to create the effect. This is also the reason you get the light rays coming through. The light rays a created by adding a caustics bitmap to a standard light like a projection. Corona Renderer doesn’t support caustics yet, so these had to be faked.

It would have been awesome to have a great model of an octopus or something in the foreground, but time is always an issue. One thing I realized during the project is that you don’t want objects too close to the camera when outputting VR’s which was the case of the Shipwreck scene.

I found out while wearing VR goggles, and it does weird things with your eyes!

All the coral was made using GrowFX and some basic poly modelling, I initially was going to model many different types of coral, but that also got away from me, I felt the underwater section was a bonus to my scene and a fun part of the VR presentation, so I ended up not going too overboard with it.

The material is fundamental too. It has a strong falloff to create a soft and microscopic look. The coral sits on volcanic rock assets from Megascans and some necessary poly meshes I built for a little more variation.

I modeled up some pirate treasure and placed on board – this sort of created a story (a subtle tale) my scene where it may have been an ecological site where one could dive and discovered the treasure or is the treasured cursed and cannot leave the island?

I doubt it 😊

If anyone has any questions, I will be happy to answer them if you would like for me to cover something I missed in this making-of.

Making of Northern Wisps

by Bartosz Domiczek

Although it’s pretty close to the booming tourist routes, it remains relatively tranquil due to the more dominant river crossing on the way. That place gave me the possibility to create some plausible scenes which evoke serenity with chilling hints of the raw, untamed and besieging nature.

The project turned out to be pretty complex in the end, including many scenes in various lighting scenarios. It wasn’t however planned in this form and thus never felt really overwhelming.

In the beginning, I thought about only one scene with 2-4 points of views. The rules of the competition required preparing spherical images so I organized this environment so as it would be interesting all around. It’s a common pain with spherical panoramas that they include only 10-20% of the absorbing content, and the rest is merely a filler. I tried to avoid it, at least in first renderings.

Let’s start then!

Modeling and Texturing 

The first one is the archetype of an ancient shelter with a central fireplace. The second one is about the simplest geometry that contrasts the complexity.

The example here can be the black monolith from 2001: A Space Odyssey, rectangular light sources in some photography works of Benoit Paillé, and the series of metallic objects by Dillon Marsh.

The simple form becomes the great mystery in those juxtapositions. It gains the quality of an emerging deity or some intangible truth being unveiled in front of the incompetent mind. That’s why I imagined the cabins to be seen as a row of Nordic gods stalled at the mountain ridge. It’s genius loci of this project.

The purity of the form that I aspired to was based on the references of the Japanese objects which are made of wood and semi-translucent covers of fabric or polycarbonate.

I outlined the general shape with the wood frame, and I tried to keep it relatively credible.

The external fabric was simulated in Marvelous Designer, using double seams on the edges. The results were intersecting with some tiny elements of the frame, but it could be easily manually fixed.

Other parts of the cabin were detailed in Zbrush.

The material of the external cover was the crucial aspect of this project. I wanted the very specific translucency and some plastic glossiness that would evoke the construction site feel. Nothing too sophisticated, rather uniform and utilitarian.

Obviously, meeting those expectations required a lot of trials and errors from me. I set up a few lighting scenarios and checked the changes in all of them so as to get as close to the perfect result as possible. I helped myself with a few maps from Megascans which brought some intricate details.

3D Terrain

Apart from a few bonus scenes, my environment was pretty barren, and I couldn’t hide the terrain’s characteristics underneath the vegetation.

I started with collecting a bunch of references and creating the basic typology of geological forms I needed. I also assigned the specific tools I wanted to use.

HUGE FORMS (everything from a single peak to mountain ranges, glaciers) – I decided to base my workflow here on World Machine and bring some additional detailing in Zbrush.

MEDIUM FORMS (screen, couloir, others – everything that exists in the context of enormous scale geomorphology but is close enough to s camera to require some extra detailing) – I decided to base it on photogrammetry and Zbrush.

SMALL FORMS (stones, rocks, small cliffs) – This scale is in 80% made of Megascans and complemented with some other assets I already had prepared.

I established the base form with some parametric variations. In this case, it’s only the lone mountain, but usually, I cover the larger area. After computing the erosion and weathering, I get the plausible shape. The first coloring is made with the help of the maps generated during the performed simulations, e.g., representing erosion flow, sediment deposits, weathering, etc.

I like the results apart from the ridge area. It’s usually very erosion dependant and doesn’t represent the variety of geological structures that can appear. This is why I decided to include Zbrush into my workflow and re-sculpt those parts of the asset.

I must mention that the World Machine output can be mesh or height map based. Since there is a possibility to generate 16k maps, this option usually bears more detail information (unless one goes hi-poly). However, I chose the mesh based workflow here because I planned to scatter other assets over the mountains later (mostly low vegetation and rocks). This also allowed me to recreate some of the lost details via sculpting and to bake normal maps.

Working in Zbrush was pretty straightforward and included trimming the ridges (to achieve some sharp edges) and using rock alphas to brush new details.

3D Terrain Generation 

As I have already mentioned, a majority of Megascans used in this project was various kinds of rocks. There were examples of granite, volcanic and sandstones types. I adjusted their albedos to get the consistent look. Importing them into the scene was an easy task.

I used the highest LOD version with an additional displacement applied, and while I had 20-30 unique assets in the scene, the memory consumption would get pretty high. This could be easily optimized, though – it was just me getting greedy for indiscernible details. There would be hardly any difference if I turned the displacement off.

Above are Megascans and other assets used in scenes (not all of them and not in scale here).

Working with Megascans

I mentioned that vegetation wasn’t a big part of this project, but I made a few bonus scenes to practice some techniques. I used a lot of 3rd party assets, yet also created a few by myself. One of them is the native Eriophorum grass, but it’s merely a utilization of the 3dsMax hair&fur modifier so I won’t cover it in this making-of.

Instead of it, I will discuss some trees generated in TheGrove3d (although they didn’t get into the spotlight of the frame). This software works as the add-on within Blender environment and simulates the growth of a tree in the intervals of one year.

Although it has some limitations, the trees can be produced in a few clicks (by using presets), and their branching is very plausible. Twigs/leaves are distributed by scattering, which can be helpful and make it easy to work along with Megascans atlas files.

The only significant problem I have with the outcome is a generic look of a trunk with some additional issues regarding intersecting meshes of main branches. This is how I work around it.

I detach main branches and delimit the polygons that need more detailing (shown here with a basic sphere covering the areas of intersecting meshes).

I am too impatient to fix the mesh manually, so I import the attached object into Zbrush and change it into Dynamesh. The new quad-only mesh is projected onto the trunk, and it becomes a great base for further sculpting.

Framing, Lighting, Rendering and Post Production

The project consists of various scenes, and it’s hard to find common ground when describing them. Let me just to pick a few examples.

I scattered the assets with Forest Pack. I used splines to determine various scattering areas.

There was a couple of situations in which I wanted the stormy sky with accurately orchestrated sunset rays.

I used Corona Renderer, and it was the first time I worked with it since the very beginning of such a big project. The results were great out-of-box, and most of the final adjustments were made inside the framebuffer. My only external post-processing encapsulated incidental replacing of a sky, fixing minor glitches and painting some tiny details (e.g., scratches on some surfaces).

I used Corona’s Light Mixer to balance the lighting in a few night scenes. Possibility to do it after finishing the rendering is the great time-saver at the stage of a scene preparation.

Final Notes

I couldn’t cover all aspects of the project in this making-of. I tried to keep short those steps that are well-known or well described in other tutorials.

CABINS Challenge Winners

News Announcement

Thank You!

I would like to thank the challengers and guests for taking part in this event, the seventh among many more to come! I would also like to send a big thank you to my sponsors for taking part and help in making this great challenge possible. With Quixel and Megascans leading this one, along with YulioVR, Laubwerk, Lumion and Ranch Computing as the primary sponsors. And also prize sponsors – iToo Software, AXYZ Design, VIZPARK, Polyget, Corona Renderer and MAXTREE.

Big thanks to fellow jury panel members Teddy Bergsman, Peter Guthrie, Gianpiero Monopoly, Andreas Landgren and Lasse Rode for dedicating their time and professional expertise not only for the final judgment but also supporting my efforts behind the scenes all the time.

Stay tuned for the Making-Of articles by the winners that I’ll post during this month. First one by the 1st place winner is going live come Monday, next week.

3 months + 15 days, 444 entries, 55 final entries, 24 finalists, 3 winners + 3 honorable mentions. 1 dedicated website and 1 new companion community site for the blog was born!

It is clear now that using the Megascans assets helped to reach higher levels of realism, enhanced by the fact the entrants had to consider full 3d treatment for the VR’s with YulioVR.

For the full monty, jump to CABINS Home Page and read the full mission statement, along with inspiration, concept art, jury panel and more.

Words from the Jury Panel

Before we announce the winners, here’s what jury panel members, Teddy Bergsman, Gianpiero Monopoly and Andreas Landgren, had to say to all of the challengers.

Teddy Bergsman

CEO and Co-Founder – Quixel AB, Sweden. Marquee Sponsor!

Judging the winners and honorable mentions turned out to be a real challenge, and there are many more entries that will stay with me besides the ones that ultimately made it to the very top.

Thank you, everyone, for your hard work and final submissions — and for everyone in the community it has inspired!

Gianpiero Monopoly

Co-Founder – State of Art Academy, Italy.

I had the honor and pleasure of taking part as a judge in this exciting challenge, which involved many artists from all over the world on a topic that was far from easy.

First of all, I would like to say that the overall level of the entries was really high and as a member of the jury, I had some difficulties in choosing the winners. This is a good thing!

I want to say to all of you who did not win that your work deserves the full attention from our Industry and I want to encourage everybody to pursue the goals set as artists with vigor and determination and to work day by day to improve yourselves.

Here I saw and found a lot of talent and willingness to put oneself in the game… essential characteristics to get success in life.

I wish everybody that this is only the beginning or continuation of something important in your ArchViz journey.

Andreas Landgren

Co-Founder – Tomorrow AB, Sweden.

The best proposals were those who had a poetic flair, and I look forward seeing this aspect explored in future challenges.

Northern Wisps

Gianpiero

For me, the winner is Bartosz Domiczek. From the compositional point of view, in their simplicity, I found the images well-made. I also appreciated the design and the environment in which the cabins were placed and shown in the images. I think there was particular attention in the rendering of atmospheres. At times evocative, and also unusual.

Also, I consider as a plus, the high naturalness which blends all the elements. All this makes this work remarkable and of extraordinary interest.

Andreas

The way its portrayed is both poetic and sensitive. The project shows an excellent understanding of light, color, and design. As impressive is the number of variations that Bartosz rendered beautifully.

Inside Out

Second Place Winning Entry by Jamie Holmes

Jamie is no stranger to challenges on the blog and he wins once more showcasing remarkable full 3d world building above and below the water!

Gianpiero

Also in this work, the composition is well-made, and I appreciated a lot some unusual points of view which hit my attention. The natural effect given by the images is extraordinary, and the environment creation was so well-done.

I would have liked seeing some images with night or sunset conditions because they would have given a significant variety to the whole set and conveyed more emotions.

Third Place Winning Entry by Sergey Ferley

Seeing the initial concept illustration by Sergey I was already hooked, and the amazing thing is that when you see the final result, you appreciate what Sergey did even more.

He kept true to his concept all through. Both illustration and final image are magical and inviting. Well, also scary!

Sergey did fantastic use of Yulio’s sound feature in his 360 VR tour.

It elevated the experience beyond all else and took the further step in bringing us into this world he created.

Three Honorable Mentions

It is impressive that the interior renders, the environment and Cabin all have the same level of quality. You can imagine the wild animals that curiously watch from a distance.

The 360 VR tour sure does the work in getting you there!

Audio Comes to Yulio VR Hotspots

Sponsor Spotlight

Yulio is bringing audio annotation to our vr hotspots technology. Hotspots are the Yulio method of linking scenes in your VR designs, and have always been part of our simple gaze to go navigation. customers on Enterprise level plan can add audio files of up to two minutes to attach to their designs. Check out some samples in the Yulio Showcase.

Consistent presentations, even when you’re not there

There’s some research that says adding appropriate ambient noise to VR increases the level of immersion far more than some visual tweaks. It helps block the real world a little bit, draw focus to the design and brings life to the design, when used in the right ways. Consider a ceiling or sky audio hotspot in a park with the sound of children playing, general office noises in workplaces or water sounds near fountains and pools. Just like image searches, sounds can be found online or from a service like PacDV or SoundJay.

Yulio has pursued audio hotspots because, while we have seen instances of text used in VR, our user testing has demonstrated how distracting it can be.When viewers enter a virtual world and are confronted with large blocks of text to read, it’s distracting in a few ways:

• It physically covers a portion of the design
• It’s disorienting to have text floating in space
• It represents a poor use of VR – why send them into a VRE to read?

If you’re looking for help generating audio files, there are a few options available. For quick conversation style comments between you and your client, use a native recorder app available in windows or on most smartphones. Speak slowly and eliminate ambient noise, and the file will carry your ideas clearly.

If you’re just too shy to record yourself, or want a more detached sound, there are plenty of good Text To Speech (TTS) options, like NaturalSpeech.com. The results can be a bit robotic, but they get the job done. It’s a matter of personal preference, but we find the female voice options a little more natural sounding.

For a higher end recording, worthwhile on product info you use all the time, or on a major presentation or portfolio asset, professional voice artists can be hired through agencies all over North America – a quick Google search brings up dozens of options.

Audio VR hotspots are available immediately to all Yulio Enterprise clients. To learn more and begin using them, visit our knowledge base.

New 3D Plants arrived to Megascans!

Sponsor Spotlight

3D plants consistently remain amongst the highest downloaded assets from the Megascans library each month. As with all things Megascans, the 3D plants are built with 100% scanned data and animation-ready for a wide variety of uses; including games, VFX, visualizations — and even mobile..

The Megascans library offers 3D plant assets that you’re not likely to find elsewhere — such as our creeper assets, which include the English Ivy below.

And also the Creeper Ivy variants…

The Fern asset will offer more depth to foliage, making it ideal for jungle and forest scenes.

Megascans inspires Unity’s Book of the Dead

Sponsor Spotlight

Unity Technologies and Quixel join forces once again to break new ground in interactive experiences. Today, the Unity demo team released Book of the Dead, a first-person interactive demo that showcases the power of Unity 2018’s new Scriptable Render Pipeline. Vivid and visceral, the demo makes extensive use of Megascans and pushes the envelope in lifelike design rendered in real-time.

In the words of Veselin :

In Part ONE I will cover the process up to the very start with Lumion. Part TWO will dive into what is going on inside Lumion in more depth.

Enjoy!

It just is.

Or maybe it’s just me?

Anyway, my cabin is composed of three small triangle shaped cabins in a circular formation so that each cabin goes a little over the edge of a cliff, offering amazing views of the surroundings. A hero tree is placed in the center of it all with my Lunacy Memo Book Moon at the back of it all.

This helped me figure out the way the cliff should look like from the various angles.

I’ve blocked the cliff using rock assets from the 3d Warehouse, scaling and rotating them as I duplicate and put them in place to form the overall cliff shape.

At this point, I am still thinking about doing the visuals with SketchUp and the newly released V-Ray for SketchUp so all was supposed to be done inside SketchUp with the help of Skatter and Laubwerk Plants Kit to populate the entire area with trees before I begin the views exploration stage.

Thing is… I took a short break from this initial concept stage before I came back to it for obvious reasons.

Work!

I did manage to output some mood / lighting tests with V-Ray while exploring the new version.

You’ve seen my first tests with it in the “Hello! MMF House Meets Lumion” article I posted on the blog back on November 23rd. I took a gradual approach to this process, as should you if you like to explore it. You can’t just dive into Lumion running around aimless thinking you’ll get the hang of it. It is not like any other software you’ve used.

Lumion comes packed with a few pre-made scenes, the Farnsworth House being one of them.

I could not skip the photoshop part, though I did manage to minimize it to color grading mostly. With that part explored as well as remaking the MMF House, I was ready to continue with the cabins concept.

Before that, I took Farnsworth House for one last spin as I practice making an environemt similar to what the cabins concept needs.

For CABINS, I search for a place with specific terrain features and Salt Lake City, Utah, USA was the perfect fit for what I needed. Creating a terrain to match specific project needs can be time-consuming. There is no need to create it from scratch and many benefits if you rely on real-world data.

I have identified two areas with a good looking cliff and enough space for water to wrap around it at a lower level. I’ve marked these spots in the diagram below, which represents the terrain data before I tweaked it to accomedate the cabins and added more rockformations to it.

Below you can see both locations after the tweaks that allow me to land a cabin on the cliffs edge.

Till then, enjoy the CABINS set of visuals below.