Autodesk’s Technical Team Lead, Marcel DeJong Shows How Easy it is to Create a Super High Polygon Forest With Maya 2018 and MASH

Demonstrating an Arnold workflow exercise, the Technical Team Lead for Autodesk’s Media and Entertainment shows how easy it can be to populate detailed scenes in Maya 2018 using Maya built-in tools. DeJong creates a 620 million or so polygon forest in a matter of minutes.

Maya is pretty good with high poly counts like this. The application and viewport can easily push high polygon scenes without scoffing. When your polygon counts in your scene gets way too high, Maya offers a few processes for managing them to a workable form.

Watch the 15 minute tutorial that describes the process from start to finish covering vegetation, alpha cut, color jitter (for easily varying colors in the trees), and using stand-ins with Arnold. Also covered is using MASH, specifically the ID node and random node to quickly and arbitrarily place the trees in the scene. It is not used here, but MASH has a fairly new world node that offers a high degree of control and can make dressing environments easy.

Before you know it, there is a 620 million polygon forest to render, using Arnold.