So I built in a way that it can be manipulated per shot and the rocks can be freely moved from shot to shot to create a good composition.Īll the rocks are hand placed. Once all the assets were built and textured I put them together in Houdini to create the environment assets which included all the rocks, mountains, background… I quickly realized that I cannot create just one environment that would look good from all the camera angles in the film. So I tried a simple hand painted background and it worked much better than the volume clouds version so I decided to completely drop that volume clouds and paint all the sky and clouds backgrounds. I really thought the clouds would be 3d volume based but the more I tested this idea the more I realized that it took me away from the simple design approach I was hoping to achieve. The sky or especially the clouds went through quite some testing.

The shader is more or less a procedural noise shader on which I added a few parameters which can be manipulated per shot like the triangle colored texture shapes. The main reason I decided for this was large texture resolution required for the ground. The ground however is completely procedural and the shader was built in Houdini. So I decided that the base of the smart material should be procedural but then added paint on top that was unique for each rock.

I was thinking of creating an all procedural shader for the rocks but I found that it was hard to get certain patterns on the rocks that I wanted to see especially when we see them up close. I created a smart material that was a base for all rocks and then just painted variations for each rock separately. All the texturing for the rocks were done in Substance Painter.

Zbrush rock