We made the big decision the redo the entire forest, so I took a week to design and create a full asset library that we could use for each setting. My primary goal with this task was to provide the team with a collection of low-poly, uniform-quality assets that I could easily surface. It was critical that these assets be able to run well in high-quantity MASH networks, since each setting will be used in multiple shots and animators need real-time feedback when they're working in a file.
Some asset models were revised from previous iterations we had used, and others I found online. Once I designed the asset library, I cleaned up and reduced the geometry of each model so the file size would remain manageable for use in large quantities, and I moved onto designing asset textures. The nice thing about using Arnold stand-ins within MASH networks is that when I apply a texture to the base file, we can simply update the network to see the texture in camera, and we don't have to worry about any referencing or geometry that could have been accidentally transformed.
Here are a few of the surfaces I designed for these new assets, which utilize a revised version of the "painterly-style" surfacing tool Avery and I collaborated on:
