Jesús Fernández shares his process for creating his stunning “the Forgotten Forest” with a detailed written tutorial looking at how Maya PaintFX was used to create the grasses, trees and foliage in the image.
when we assemble the parts will create an intersection and it will have a pattern that is going to be visible, and we want an uniform patch of grass
Jesús creates grass elements in a “bundle” from Maya’s PaintFX system, and then uses particles to issue placement of where the grasses will show up, using a particle instancer to set the placement, scale and position of the PaintFX elements.
Most every step of the process is covered here, showing how to build all the elements, put them together in a scene, creating and applying shaders, and render settings.
Jesús notes that he was able to render the final image at 4k resolution using less than 3GB of RAM, which is pretty impressive. It is really difficult to express in the title of the post how great this detailed tutorial is, it really is a must-see. Check out the Maya PaintFX Mental Ray Forgotten Forest Tutorial here.