Floating Islands -Assets look development

Floating Islands - environment showcase

After a year of ups and downs I can finally show this project. Although it didn't turn out to be like my original idea, I am happy to be able to display a bit of this project. This time, the task focused on creating an environment with natural elements, sculpted mountains, trees and scatter objects. I went for a captivating scene with floating islands, lush trees, and winding vines— inspired by the fantastical world of Pandora from the film Avatar.

Hope u like it :)

Creation proccess

After gathering references, the next phase focused on modelling the floating islands, the centrepiece of the scene. Using tools such as ZBrush, I developed a complete set of islands, then transferred them to Maya along with their respective displacement maps and created nodal materials to give them realism. The most challenging part of this stage was the creation of the materials, where I implemented a workflow between Quixel Mixer to generate custom materials and Maya to apply material layers. With this project I learned how to use zBrush, and it was a lot of fun to make giant rocks :)

Once the islands were completed, I embarked on the task of creating realistic trees and vines using SpeedTree, also incorporating wind animations to add dynamism to the scene.

The process of scattering the vegetation on the islands proved to be one of the most complex. Although I only achieved the desired result on one of the islands, I experimented with all them and after much trial and error, I discarded the rest of the renders.

Like any creative project, I faced (many) challenges along the way. Bringing together different elements in a short time was tough. I had to be precise, from crafting detailed plants to keeping the computer graphics efficient. For all these reasons, this project has been on my mind for a year now... And although I've been stuck on it for a while, I wanted to show it and share the work I've done so I could learn from it.

Looking back on it, I feel proud. I've gained new skills and a fresh perspective. I'm excited to use what I've learned in future projects, always aiming to be better and more creative.

At last here is a video of the trees ^^

Thank u so much for passing by, see u at the movies :)