Vegetation Exploration

I was very inspired by Guillermo del Toro's "Pan's Labyrinth" so I took a lot of cues from it. This included the main tree, the lighting, and overall mood. 

This was entirely my first experience creating vegetation since I'd started 3D, and it was a huge challenge on its own to learn.

Initially, these were planned to be handmade in ZBrush, but I eventually moved onto using scanned content and modifying them with Quixel Mixer to retain normal information, all the while creating my own unique cards.

The final flyby video of the environment! Learned so much and challenged myself a lot to use (and learn) Designer as well as learn all sorts of different pipelines and techniques to get different results. 

I can't see myself being a vegetation artist in the future, but all of this was such a great learning experience that I don't regret going through all that hard work to get to the final product :)