First project of my Demo Reel

Finding your home

The beginning

This is my first finished project for my demo reel. I wanted to build something that in my opinion give a sense of tranquility within imperfection. This is why I built this house, worn by time, in one of the most peaceful places that I can think of, the forest.

References

Started the project by gathering a bunch of references. I wanted to find something that in my mind represents this peaceful, cozy feeling. From all of the references I handpicked 3 main ones so that I don't confuse myself with too much information. Vegetation, I searched for some decent looking spruce trees with different angles and a closeup to understand better how is it built. As for bushes I tried to find some that could coexist together with spruce. Cliff reference I used to make some bigger stones to show differences in ground elevation.

Blockout

In my opinion this is the most important stage at least for me, because by using primitive objects I can quickly understand if the shape of the creation is working well or not. Also I think it is important to work in real world scale or as close to it as possible, that is why I imported average male model that has a height of 1.8m so that I can understand better how tall are things and if it makes sense. Also in this stage I tried playing around with different elevations of ground to get a bit more interesting look. I think that it is also a good idea to scatter around some objects around the place where someone lives to make it more lively and help the story. So by trying different shapes and different camera angles I settled down to this one.

Making the house

Once I was finished with blockout, I started to refine shapes and add more detailed shapes to it. I tried my best to make every angle of the house look interesting. I wasn't too happy about the roof so I made a simple subdivided triangle and put a Lattice modifier on it to get more organic looking shape. Then I build a plane with shingles attached to it so that I don't have to put them on roof one by one.

Vegetation

Trees I made using Speedtree, this was my first time using the software so after few trials and errors I got them looking close to what I was going for. Textures I got from poliigon which I changed a little bit in Vray shader parameters. Grass and bushes also were made in Speedtree but these were a lot more easy to make. Took me a while to figure out how to export wind animation from Speedtree, but it wasn't too bad. Ivy generator plugin didn't work with Maya 2020 so I had to get newest version of it and I imported the house there and made the ivy.

Landscape

I decided to play around more with landscape to improve the composition, this is also when I decided to make some stones that represent cliff edges to get a better feel for composition. I made it so that trees, stones, logs on the ground and the small wooden structure is pointing at the house to navigate eye towards it.

Texturing

While texturing the house I wanted to have these nice shades of brown, red and yellow to make the house feel nice and warm. Also I wanted it to look slightly worn down, with few cracks in wall that have this crunchy bumpy feel on top. Some dirt from ground on top of wooden beams from all the rainy weather that is dried up now in the sun and some spruce needles with some moss on the rooftop cracks and crevices. I adjusted texture color and roughness in Maya Vray to match better with lighting.

Nuke

In this software I played around with different type of looks, colors, added sky and some god rays, a fog in the distance and a dust cloud slightly above the ground to give more of the dry season feeling.

Last thoughts

I have learned a lot from this project. I learned how to work with Speedtree, how to solve multiple problems, how to come to understand what my limits are, and using these skills, how to raise the bar and expand on my work. I also wanted to learn how to present my work better, so this project helped me a lot to do all of those things.

Thank You for your consideration

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