Fighter Kites - Progress Check No. 15

This week I took a wee break from the character project and did some deep-diving into set dressing and techniques we might use in Maya. I went through a mini-crisis on Wednesday thinking about how set dressing works in Maya relative to UE5 and how to transfer things from Unreal. I might try to build our scenes in UE first (including vegetation set dressing, lighting, shading, fog, etc.) so we have a platform for what to accomplish in Maya. Since Maya is much slower, doing all the look development testing in UE would be extremely beneficial and would definitely speed up the pipeline down the line.

I spend time researching techniques for creating stylized trees and grasses in Maya, including wind movement, and found some great sources. I did notice how most of the demos were done in Unreal and Blender, but taking the general idea and applying it within Maya is possible. Some of the resources includes: a great resource for instancing trees and using lattice deformers to animate wind. I also found a way to do stylized trees which would be helpful blending the matte painting into the horizon.

One of my concerns was making sure our set dressing doesn't end up looking like arm hairs coming out of skin (ground planes and random grasses sticking out), so I looked at the newest Puss In Boots movie for inspiration and saw they combined instanced alpha cards with grass geometry.

It's especially visible in the clip above where some of the grasses are just sticking out of the ground (not that this looks good -- just breaking down their technique).

However, it does begin to read well when there's more ground coverage and things going on. Aelma created some black and white alphas of varying grasses and I populated a quick shot and the technique begins to read. Something important to consider is time and possibly using Houdini/Mash to instance grasses to points on the ground plane.

What I have above still has the arm hair effect, but considering shot comp and playing around with this some more, I think we're headed in a great direction!