From the course: Creating a Short Film: 09 VFX Environments

Making CG scenery

From the course: Creating a Short Film: 09 VFX Environments

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Making CG scenery

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- [Instructor] One of the biggest question marks I had going into the visual effects of The Assurance was how I was going to extend the rocks that Natty climbed on in the finale shots, to make it look like these rocks were part of an entire world. I initially thought that I would just create matte paintings which is a way of creating an environment, or extending an existing environment or set by using photos or painting. And I can't paint so I would need to use photos. But the challenge I had, was that I needed this to feel like an entire world, I wasn't just making one isolated shot here. And with the way I shot it, you know, with different shot sizes and angles and stuff, I needed it to look good from different directions. So even if I found the ideal images to use as the basis for a matte painting, there's no way that I could get photos of the same space that precisely matched the angles that I shot with. So I decided that I had to create the whole scene digitally. I knew that I would lose some realism, by making an entirely CG environment, but that the end result would be so much more flexible, and I needed that flexibility. But at the time I had no experience creating CG landscapes. After doing some homework, I realized that this is kind of a huge field of study, in and of itself. I'm familiar with Cinema 4D, and I knew that Cinema 4D had a landscape tool, and since I'm comfortable with that world, I thought that would work, but if I felt it didn't have stuff like strata or erosion to customize the landscape and make it believable. Now, other 3D apps like Blender or maybe Houdini, they have height fields, which is basically a way of taking a black and white image and extruding it to form a surface, which is great for creating stuff like mountains. But I didn't know this stuff existed then. And also, I was kind of looking for a tool that entirely specialized in terrain generation so I could dial in and get the look that I wanted. I discovered in my research, that it's actually more common to use specialized terrain software for the PC and not on Mac, and I am on a Mac. So that narrowed down my options to two really good choices, I think, I mean I think there's others out there but I narrowed down two choices that would work for me, Terragen and VUE xStream. Now, Terragen has a really unique interface that I struggled with. I really wanted to use Terragen initially because I found the rendering engine to be very believable. I followed this tutorial that I found online and I made this mountain, and it was so impressive to me. I mean you can see here the iterations as I followed the tutorial, and how each layer added new complexity and realism to this scene. The only problem was that learning curve, it just wasn't an interface that I was used to, and I had to get this done for this project. So I decided to go with VUE xStream. The renders didn't look as realistic and lifelike to me, at least with my skills I couldn't get it there. But, the interface felt very familiar, it was really easy to get up and running. I experimented with the program and found it really easy to create plants, which I actually didn't use for The Assurance, but if I wanted to create plants it was super easy to do that. Clouds, you create mountains, even entire planets with just a click of a button. VUE gave me the flexibility I needed to get the scenes and shots that I wanted without a steep learning curve. So it was worth the trade-off in photorealistic rendering. In the next couple of tutorials, I'm going to give you both a little overview of VUE xStream and also, how I created the cliffs for The Assurance.

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