The Raging River

The “Raging River” scene proved particularly challenging due to the fact that we needed to show trees and foliage affected by the wind from the Raging River, and because data storage on this project was severely limited (and inadequate), we had to get creative when creating geometry caches for layout assets.

Utilizing a technique I developed in which variations of SpeedTree animations for a single tree were stacked and looped, layout artists were able to create 3 different tree breeds with 3 variation animations of each breed. The start times of each loop for each tree was randomized and the result is a pretty organic looking forest with wind movement, without apparent visible looping or duplication. Without trimming down each animation to a looped state, this scene would have been impossible to render.

I was personally responsible for:

• Lookdev and shading on the water (foam pattern generated by Jason Leandro)
• Tree foliage animation development (final animations shown are done by Donato Morera)
• Scene asset data management and IT
• Maya+Redshift render layers tool to break out passes easily based on scene groups at different hierarchy levels