I set myself to create weekly projects in order to keep myself disciplined, challenged, and entertained. I also decided that for each one of those projects I will create a breakdown video, a tutorial regarding the theme in the project, and also share some of the stuff I’ve made for free.
This week I have this little guy, which I named My Little Cabin in the Sky.
I started the project inside of Houdini where I created the landscape terrains - both the foreground terrain, as well as the background mountains. I love using Houdini to create landscapes. The first time I had to use it was in the studio working on the game (which I’m still working on together with the team).
Inside Houdini I’ve done all the procedural modeling of the landscapes, created the masks for the texturing phase which came in later, and exported all the materials I knew I needed.
All the texturing was done inside Substance Painter, a tool I’ve been using for years now, something I too grabbed along the way while working on video games.
This is where I textured all the custom assets I’ve made for this project.
Blender was used for modeling and, well, everything else - scene setup, lighting, rendering, you name it. I modeled the cabin, the little garden, and the foliage which was scattered on the ground and on the cabin. I didn’t want to make the foliage at first, but I had to come up with something really optimized because my scene was broken with all those instances, and I literally had to wait like 10 seconds after I pressed any button.
I borrowed the trees from the Botaniq addon, and a couple of assets from Quixel to fill up my scene.
I always wonder how to achieve so saturated landcape but not looking like cartoon or poster. You made it look so good. Is this only color menagement tab used or color nodes setup?
Right? I had a business trip to Finland with the studio I’m working with and for a couple of days we stayed in a very rustic wooden cabin inside a forest. It wasn’t high up on the mountains with a view like I portrayed in my render, though, but you know, artistic decisions and all.
The place itself and the Finnish forest were so cool and cozy. I can’t even start to describe the amount of moss that grows in those places
I’m a urban city kind of guy, but damn I’d stay there for a while.
Landscape terrains tend to be really complex and have all sorts of intersecting & blending textures, so getting those right is a must. I can honestly say that, for me, Houdini is the guy that deserves the credit for enabling me to do those. I would’ve stayed away from making my own landscapes if it wasn’t for Houdini.
It allows me to create those really intricate terrain masks which I can then manipulate freely inside Substance.
The textures I got from Quixel are great, but not necessarily a requirement, especially since the camera is not really a close up.
I don’t mess with the color management stuff inside Blender, so the textures are good to go straight out of Substance. I do however enhance my colors in post using Photoshop. This below is my RAW render straight out of Blender and as you can see it’s definitely no as vibrant as the final render.
Also, note that I’ve just released a whole video on this project, talking all about it - the inspiration, the struggles, the solutions I had to come up with.
