Week 5: Modeling Environment

This week I dedicated my time to modeling the environment of the painting. This included building the ground plain and sculpting it to look like a river terrain as well as learning a new software called TreeIt to create all of the foliage in the scene. I also finished modeling the bridge that goes across the river, the stone wall and the boat dock. Lastly I staged the whole environment in Maya.

When building the terrain I decided to sculpt it in ZBrush because I had the freedom to make the model extremely high or low poly and I think sculpting in ZBrush is a lot smoother than in Maya. It was hard for me to get the right bend and curve in the river but after trial and error I figured out a good way to do it. 

Once the river had been sculpted out I was able to make the bridge that spanned the length of the gap in the river. In order to make the bridge I used a Boolean on a rectangle to create the arches then used a bend deformer to get the curved effect the bridge has.

Once the bridge was done and everything was laid out I dipped into a software called TreeIt. This software is good for creating custom trees that look relatively realistic. The software is a little complex and full of settings but I'm starting to get the hang of it. 

From here on out I plan on learning and getting a good understanding on how TreeIt works. Then I will be working on populating the scene with a bunch of trees. Once that is finished I will start working on final modeling touch ups before I get into UVing.