Jungle Ruins Design Breakdown

The finished scene

This was a class project and the idea behind it was to create a jungle scene using mostly NURB’s. The project also was going to teach us how to use the program called Real Flow. Now being a fan of adventure and exploring I decided to take the project in a different direction than the other students. I decided to add a ruined temple that had been eroded by water falling from a mountain.

The first thing I needed to do was start to create all the assets for the scene. I looked on the internet for a variety of pictures of jungle/forest plants, trees, and waterfalls.

So I started with a variety of tree bases. I made shapes of palm trees, thinner forest trees, and the much bigger trees.

Next I created the ferns and used the same fern leaves to create the palm tree leaves. After that I created the ground leaves and the smaller palm trees with fan leaves.

I then took the smaller trees and made them the branches of the larger tree.

I wanted to have the light fog coming through a canopy of leaves so I added it to the assets scene first.

Once that worked I started to work on the terrain and layout of the scene I wanted to create. I wanted to have a camera shot where you look like you are running through the jungle around a mountain and see a temple with waterfalls as you come to a clearing.

After I got the whole terrain laid out like I wanted I then added the temple shape. I then converted all of the terrain and temple into polygons so I could then import it into Real flow.

I had to tweak a lot of the settings in real flow and I finally got the water looking closer to what I wanted for my scene.

Next I imported all my assets into the scene including the light fog.

I added textures after that. On the palm trees I found a nice picture of some palm tree bark as well as a forest tree. I used those on the tree bases. For the leaves I created just a regular ramp shader from green to yellow but quickly realized that the leaves stood out too much and looked out of place.

So what I did was add a fractal node to each of the colors of the ramp to include some random artifacts and some browns as well as dark greens. It added a more realistic look to the leaves.

Unfortunately anytime I tried to render the whole thing with the smaller leaves on the big trees and the water but it would halt any of the computers I was working on. So in order for me to finish in by the 3 week deadline I had to cut some of the leaves as well as the waterfall from the scene.

I was able to get a few renders of the scene with the waterfall in it rendered in mental ray using image based lighting.

But to be able to get the light fog in the scene the whole thing needed to be rendered using maya software. I created a camera that bounces and stutters like someone running and rendered it out. That gives us the final product.

Like with all of my scenes I do have game environments in mind when building them. I like to envision a game world that someone could actually take part in and enjoy.