The Short film required two different stream settings established, one with a low meandering creek and another with a wide spread rising ocean.
For the short meandering stream, we had to form it to create horizon lines along the camera shots whilst also making sure that the backdrops appeared pseudo-two dimensional.
This early version of the Stream had a simple flat-water texture with modeled reeds with constructed lattice – however it didn’t offer enough variety in the scene – and as it’s one of the primary and most long-sitting shots it needed something more developed.
A couple of lighting tests eventually led to the right feel, creating a sense of a warm summer afternoon.
The other side of the stream had an exaggerated hill-top with a lone tree, which would be covered in dandelions and a lighter tinged grass layer.
Most scenes are rendered out on high contrast layers as tifs, because they tend to actually appear faded on screen, when in Maya itself or the arnold renderview they look like the above .png.
The Reeds and other small features around the room are paint effects converted to polygons.
This tutorial was useful for figuring out how to go about creating some interesting and simple.
Forcing the perspective on the left hand side to create the illusion of a larger environment is just part of the features we used to piece together the landscape we wanted.
