A few days ago, Ronen Bekerman posted some strangely hypnotic images by artist Lee Griggs. As Lee explains on his blog, these were modeled in Maya and rendered in Arnold. Lee used XGen, a technology license by Autodesk from Disney that allows the distribution and manipulation of large numbers of geometry primitives on a surface. I was burning to give it a try it. The problem: Autodesk has only implemented XGen in Maya and, as you may know, I’m a Max, not a Maya, guy. Which got me wondering whether a similar effect could be achieved in Max and V-Ray using ItooSoft’s Forest Pack, one of my favorite Max plugins.
The answer is yes, though I suspect the approach to the end result is slightly different. I’m posting these experiments below. Each scene uses one surface and one piece of geometry (cubes, hexagons, spheres, cylinders…) at a time. One texture drives the color of the distributed geometry while another (a B&W version of the first with some tweaks) drives scale and rotation. I’ve added some goodies such as V-Ray fog, clouds and water to emphasize the landscapy feel. These were quick renders, with DOF and other effects done in PShop. The lighting was done with a handful of Peter Guthrie skies. Thanks to Lee for the inspiration. Make sure to visit his site for more experimental stuff.
Really nice imagery! I’m working with Maya, XGen and Vray. Do you have any ideas which (vray) shader is similar to your forest texture in 3ds max?
Regards
Fantastic, I particularly like the one with the mostly dark, and some bright spheres, evocative of some strange city at night. I made a few renders following Lee Grigg’s style in Blender (http://www.cutsquash.com/2014/08/abstract-landscapes-blender/), but I’ve really got to go back and play with adding fog, water etc!
Thanks a lot Greenivy! Glad you like it!
As a landscape student, i would love to see more stuffs like this :”)) Such a inspiration.
Yes, VrayEnvFog with a BerconNoise map driving fog density.
Hi !
a small question : how did you achieve those small clouds ? VrayEnvFog or post ?
thx,
nyc
An alternative approach (Just for info, as I find Forest Pack much easier to use) :
http://vimeo.com/103107232
Forgot to mention that the method I outlined only works if you don’t scale the X & Y in the transforms. If you scale those, enabling collisions will be your only chance to avoid intersections.
Good point. This is how I did the red landscape, though the pieces could be even closer together.
You can avoid intersections if you select a grid for the distribution map, and then scale down the density units until your shapes fit snuggly together.
For example, on a plane 140×140, Set the density to 5.0 units with Grid 1 as the map. Then use a box .25 x .25 x 1.0 as the geometry. It fills in nice and tight. This should work if the UV coordinates are planar projected.
If you enable collisions, you can end up with some unwanted holes as it will remove those that are too close to each other, but will not fill in that area afterwards.
Yes it does, using the collision tool. It’s quite computationally taxing though. The other question is whether it’s something you’d want to do. It depends on the look you’re going for. The last image here has little or no intersection. And some of Lee’s images have a lot of them. But if no intersections is what you want, then yes, Forest can do it.
Looks cool. But do Forest Pack have ability to avoid intersections?
As I see, XGen can do that.
I’d say these clips are solidly hypnotic.
this is just beatiful!
but by strangely hipnotic images one can have this in mind:
http://www.beeple-crap.com/vjclips.php