Common Art - Week 06 - Use of Composition

 Final:

Brief Technical Approach

Because the workload this round was substantial, I cant unpack every implementation detail, but I can outline the core approach. Given the large volume of assets required, I used Houdini as the primary modeling tool to procedurally generate rocks and trees (I was not sure whether third-party assets were allowed this round, so aside from a teammate's wolf sculpt, everything else was authored by me). 

Tree

Rock

The grass was hand-painted in Photoshop as card meshes and rendered as billboards so the quads always face the camera.For a unified wind system, I drove vertex animation using a single flow map sampled in world space, so all trees and grass respond consistently to the same wind field.

Grass Mask

 The flame VFX were created by painting a mask in Photoshop and then applying a blend of gradient noise and Voronoi noise in the shader to introduce turbulent distortion.

Fire Flame Mask

For texturing, based on prior analysis of Journey, the look avoids intricate motifs. I painted vertex colors in Maya to establish material/tonal guides, then did quick texture passes in Substance Painter, and rendered with my custom toon shader. Ambient occlusion uses my own SSAO implementation, which provides higher accuracy and broader compatibility. Atmospheric fog is handled with an exponential depth fog post-process.

Wolf Sculpture Texture

SSAO

Exponential Depth Fog

As for water and tree rendering, I iterated on my earlier portfolio work to better balance performance and visual quality; the overall methodology follows what I’ve documented previously on my blog.

    Terrian

Final