The Gnomon Workshop – Creating Plants in Maya/Mental Ray Forest Techniques, part One with Alex Alvarez

In this title, Alex thoroughly covers how to create realistic plants using Maya, Paint Effects and Mental Ray. We begin by evaluating the default paint effects library and how to convert the strokes into renderable geometry with mia Materials. Using Physical Sun/Sky, we create more photorealistic renders through the creation of our own materials in a tonemapped workflow circumventing the default shaders created by Paint Effects. Everything necessary to create double sided shaders with realistic glossy reflections and translucency is demonstrated in detail. We look at mapping all relevant paramaters for more believable shaders via diffuse, bump, reflection and translucency, including how to organize UVs into tiles for variety in our leaf textures. We take an in-depth look at creating ivy with Paint Effects and the Ivy Generator tool and incorporate the discussed techniques for plants and ivy into a cliff scene. All relevant Paint Effects settings are then discussed so that we can create our own custom plant library, all of which culminates in a photorealistic forest trail. We create a variety of plants from scratch including ferns, ground cover clover, spider plants and more, demonstrating how to incorporate them into a complex environment.