Creating the enviroment

Creating the environment

I have begun creating the environment attempting to create a forest. In my scene I have only used three tree types with one featuring more prominently than the others, to ensure that the trees appear random and unique I’ve simply rotated, shrunk or expanded the trees to make them look as if they are completely different trees, in some cases I’ve even used the trees as big bushes with the roots and base of the tree sticking out below the grass plane, I’ve also done this to block out some of the surrounding light and make the forest look as if its expansive and endless.

Here is an example of the bend nodes sticking out of the trees

Animating the Environment

Animating the environment was something that I struggled with first, I spent hours on thinking about what I could do to create smoke and the movement of the trees swaying in the wind. At first I thought I would need to rig all the trees and the individual leaves, however, I looked at some tutorials and realised that the deform tab exists. (I’m unsure why I forgot this existed as I used it to create the bends in the leaves and bushes) With the Deform tab I used the Bend node to create the movement in the trees, when using the bend node I did run into the issues which resulted in me using the graph to fix the speed at which the trees were blowing, as It looked as if the wind was blowing harshly when I wanted the breeze to be gentle, in the end, I did manage to fix it. In the animation graph, I made sure that each of the trees and bushes with bend nodes was endlessly going on repeat to emulate the movements of the trees. To create the animation I simply applied the bend node to the tree and made sure that the movement wouldn’t apply to the base of the tree only the top of the tree so it appeared as if the tree was blowing in the wind. To give the scene more life I also created smoke using the fluids 3D container, as this is originally used for water and general fluids I made adjustments to it to make it appear as if it's smoke, this meant adjusting the clarity and how much "smoke" would dispense at a time, instead of all at once. To create this smoke effect I referenced many different tutorials on how to make smoke in Maya, below I have listed one of the tutorials I have used.