Landscape Concept Study

I have been playing with this landscape piece in Houdini for a while now and finally got it to an interesting place. It’s my first landscape in Houdini and using Quixel Bridge has been amazing. It is integrated with Houdini in such a fluid way. They made it one click to import everything ready to go in Houdini and Redshift. I still struggle with so many little things in Houdini and take classes CONSTANTLY, so to just be able to click on a plant and have it import with scatter nodes and materials all set up is a crazy time saver.

Another little mental leap for me was being able to art direct the smoke how I wanted without bashing my head against the monitor for a day.

Did some post work in Photoshop of course. ;)

News and Updates!

The fun stuff first! Jeremy Wilkins of the band We Are Parasols did a lovely blog post on all the art work I have made for their band over the years. Check out the write up here, “ARTWORK BY DANIEL KOPTON (DANKLIFE) -OR- SPHERES, SKULLS, & LIGHT.”

I finally got a bit of time to start updating the portfolio as well and added a project we did for Sierra Nevada that needed landscapes and log cabins rebuilt. Pretty fun stuff.

WAP logo study

Was tinkering around with vellum and the detangle node in Houdini yesterday and came up with this little logo study for the band, “We are Parasols”. Liking Redshift in Houdini quite a bit as well. Volumetrics are pretty easy to do. Though I say that after failing terribly at a fire sim this weekend……

Creating a Snowy Forest in UE4- Breakdown.

Really interesting break down by Leah Augustine on how she created this landscape in UE4. A lot of interesting solutions in here.

“When creating the snow textures in Substance Designer, I also created a detail normal of simple noise that I used in conjunction with the base normal. I found that when you use subsurface you tend to visually lose normal information, flattening out your material. Since I knew I wanted close up shots, I wanted to exaggerate the normals a bit more to counteract this.

I personally think that a detail normal and subsurface scattering is what helped achieve more realistic snow for this project. Subsurface, in my opinion, really brought it all together. It helps give the snow better highlights around the edges and creates the appearance of light shining through it. Subsurface can be costly, but it does make a difference .“

I tried making some snow in Octane and C4d and failed tragically. Will have to landscapes another shot at some point.