Building Atmospheric Scenes with 3ds Max and GrowFX

3D artist Andrei Mikhalenko talks about his project called Winterhill.

Andrei Mikhalenko talked to Ronen Bekerman about the creation of his most recent scene called Winterhill. It is a nice atmospheric project that is based on a picture of a winter landscape and a harvested field. The scene was built with the help of 3ds Max, V-Ray, GrowFX and Forest Pack.

The artist discusses various aspects of game production – modeling, working on vegetation, building materials, setting up the light. Andrei states that the work on the min building wasn’t too hard. The sheathing was built with the help of FloorGenerator plugin. Then he added small details with simple spheres and Clone modifier.

He also built the entire interiors:

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The main focus is on the building surrounding though. The most important details are harvested field and the haystacks. He patiently modeled all the vegetation using the GrowFX plugin for those purposes.

Take a look at a part of the interview about creating haystack:

To make things simple, the haystack can be represented as a surface with a certain thickness that is rolled by a spiral. That is why the main task was to create a spiral first and then add straws.

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To reduce the polygon count I made the haystack hollow. To achieve that I used the “slice” parameter to shrink the length of the spirals based on the distances between each spiral and the central point of the haystack. The closer spiral to the center – the more slice value is. That’s how I created the full spirals at the haystack both ends and the shortened ones in-between.

Next, I made exactly the same spirals but of the smaller diameter with an offset from the start and the end points to imitate constriction effect of the rope.

Make sure to check the rest of the interview here.

Tons of details on vegetation, materials and post-production.

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Building Atmospheric Scenes with 3ds Max and GrowFX

Andrei Mikhalenko talked to Ronen Bekerman about the creation of his most recent scene called Winterhill. It is a nice atmospheric project that is based on a picture of a winter landscape and a harvested field. The scene was built with the help of 3ds Max, V-Ray, GrowFX and Forest Pack.

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