cmiVFX – Creating Digital Forest Assets Volume 1

cmiVFX has been the leader in 3d forest calculations for a decade using mathematical equations for growing trees in L-System parsing applications, such as Houdini and Cinema 4D. However the times have changed over the years, and new methods have come along with them. The days of using turtle equations for the sole purpose of creating branches and leaves are all but a memory when you have access to IDV's SpeedTree Modeler. This modeler is highly specialized for creating trees in a Video Game Pipeline, and as of recently, been used for high end feature film work. The magic is in the speed of which it can generate trees.

it only takes minutes to spit out randomized variations of IDV's infamous tree library so that you have a totally unique set of assets. Let's just ask one follow up question. What if you are in charge of designing trees that don't yet exist? Perhaps an insight to Alien Life, or simply a call out to a popular sub species of plants not found in the default libraries, or better yet… the need to create high resolution trees to perform dynamic events on them in other visual effects applications. The magic is now back in the hands of the artist. In this volume we show you how to generate assets prior to even getting them into Speedtree. We take you through each step starting from photography, all the way to digital painting techniques and image restoration tips and tricks that will allow for your look development to be flexible and manageable with standard file structures.

Sample Image
Creating Digital Forest Assets Volume 1
Sample Image
Creating Digital Forest Assets Volume 1
Sample Image
Creating Digital Forest Assets Volume 1
Sample Image
Creating Digital Forest Assets Volume 1
Sample Image
Creating Digital Forest Assets Volume 1
Sample Image
Creating Digital Forest Assets Volume 1

Chapter Descriptions

Introduction
Chris will guide you through the purpose of this video and share some new information regarding the future of Visual Effects while demonstrating some early hints to what the Forest Pipeline will be like in the years to come.

Getting In Deep
In this chapter you will get the official breakdown of the video ahead and learn what style of training which will be taken for the viewer.

Sample Projects
Much like all the cmiVFX videos, there will be several projects that appear in concession. However, in this video, we do some time machine travel techniques to help reinforce the concepts of a Forest Pipeline for the user. Make no mistake about it, when your done watching this video, your going to know how to do all these tasks on your own immediately after.

Extracting Leaves
This is where the video starts to stand apart from anything else that you have seen before. In this chapter we start breaking down the bare essentials of a tree body so that we can determine the parts needed for reconstruction. This is crucial informations, because many of you will want custom trees that live outside the standard SpeedTree catalogue. (Wether its for the director or your own creative reasoning)

Modeling Assets In 3rd Party Apps (Cinema 4D Shown Here)
When your building a tree, you need to know before hand if the tree will be used in a game, or if it will be used in a film foreground or background. You can get away with low resolution meshes for so many things, but when your dealing with close up shots, your going to need to know how to model assets for close up dynamic animation. (Perhaps you want a water drop to roll down a leaf structure, or you need bullets to fly through a palm tree frond) Whatever the scenario is, these basic guidelines will teach you what you need to know.

Importing 3D Assets From Other Apps
Now that you know how to create external 3d meshes, learn how to import them into SpeedTree for use inside of your tree structure. There are a few tricks to learn when using 3rd party apps, such as how to maintain Y-Up model space in SpeedTree when it leans towards a Z-Up default workflow.

CrazyBump
No we aren't talking about a pimple outbreak.. We are talking about the extremely popular freeware that is used by many to create Image Passes for Diffuse, Normal, Specular, Ambient Occlusion, and Displacement. Learn how to import your textures into this app and export all the maps you are going to need to make a believable asset.

Painting Techniques
This part of the video is broken up into several chapters to help show you how to perform specific isolated tasks regarding 2d digital painting techniques. This is perhaps the most important part of the video. Topics include Border Control, Texture Isolation, Image Restoration, Matte Painting Generation, Tiling Texture Modification and more. This is the part where many CG artists lack skills, and ultimately lose believability when performed wrong.

Final Project
This project is where we rebuild a Chinelle Plant from scratch inside of SpeedTree using our newly hand made assets from previous chapters. Learn the basics of tree assembly and how to prepare your assets for the wind system. Since we are focusing mostly on asset preparation, we keep to the standard workflow of tree generation commonly used in SpeedTree.