Rebecca Ma shared her beautiful Garden of Dragons environment, made as an advanced term final project for a course in asset creation for film. The piece was inspired by Dao Vi's concept art with giant dragon-shaped fountains by a mountain spring. 

The dragons were sculpted in ZBrush, the vegetation was created with Unity's SpeedTree, and the terrain was generated using Gaea. To make the assets look realistic, the artist used procedural texturing in Maya. To set up realistic, atmospheric water and fog simulations, she used Houdini. Compositing was handled in Nuke, and the final scene was rendered with V-Ray.

As the artist explained, this scene was a step out of her comfort zone, as she had to create a fully outdoor environment, refine her sculpting skills, and learn new things like terrain generation, scattering, and fluid and fog simulations. Maciej Biniek supervised the Garden of Dragons project.

Rebecca Ma is a 3D artist with a background in mechanical engineering and film. She specializes in creating atmospheric, cinematic, lifelike pieces. If you liked Garden of Dragons, you can find more of her work on Instagram.

If you want to learn how to make stunning environments like this yourself, you're going to love this breakdown of a stone wall in an ancient forest from Ilya Oskanyan, this interview on creating a street scene by Nore Pollentier, and this detailed walkthrough on making a fantasy environment of ruins in a forest by Heather Geiger.

Subscribe to our Newsletter, join our 80 Level Talent platform, Discord, and follow us on Twitter, LinkedIn, Telegram, and Instagram, where we share breakdowns, the latest news, awesome artworks, and more.

Are you a fan of what we do here at 80 Level? Then make sure to set us as a Preferred Source on Google to see more of our content in your feed.