Chinese Garden

Hi all, it's been a while since i posted anything of my personal stuff.
but lots of things happened recently, and i hadn't had any inspiration.

i started to explore the world of Houdini, and been following lessons, books etc...
and came up with and idea to try out to slowly apply those skills on practice.
----------
Initial Concept:

• 
  Generate a 3D environment from the reference footage. Focus on creation of realistic and
  believable renders supported by FX.

• 
  To unitize Maya for creation of general base geometry, UV and texture maps as well as prototype for the render.

• 
  Create general template geometry to help with further development in Houdini.

• 
  Once base modeling and prototyping is complete, transfer generated assets to Houdini to develop additional geometry, that can present ability of procedural modeling and texturing.

• 
  Incorporate vegetation following tutorials from SideFx website.

• 
  Research dynamic vegetation growth and generation using L-Systems(or alternatives)

• 
  Discover and learn the procedural rendering pipeline available using Mantra-Render-Engine.

• 
  Generate fluids using Houdini's flip-solver, by creating simulated rain, pound and fluid-sculpting systems.

• 
  Explore the possibilities of the particles system to generate ambiance.

• 
  Generate particles of dust/debris floating in the air, small insects(over the pond/in the alleys)

• 
  Experiment with Houdini's dynamics system and fracturing algorithms in order to simulate destruction(collapsing walls, water in pond reacting to collision).

• 
  Experiment with texture animation (aging - to use aging effect to simulate the rusting metal)

------------

The reference images are from my trip that we(my family) took in march, to Hamilton Gardens. (see link for details: http://hamiltongardens.co.nz/ / )

You can see the video and some images that i took there for my reference:
Youtube:
unfortunately video is not all that great. My lady suggested that we should go there again, to shoot for project, and not for fun

Ref-Sheet:

And these are few screenshots that show where i am at the moment. It has been about 2 weeks of production. (about 1.5 -3 hours a day) and i blend between using video lessons and experimenting on my own:
-----
This is a paint over the map that i am building up


This is what i have so far done. Most of it is just gray-boxing, but it is procedural, so tweaks are super fast and scene is light as hell, since everything is instancing...
-----

I was hoping to keep this tread alive, and post progress here.

cheers!

Cool man, your planning seems really in depth, so I'm sure this will turn out great.

Whats your end product going to be? Are you making a gallery of stills, or perhaps a short animation?

Hi AJ! I was planning for animation. I wanted to take the camera footage that i have here on youtube and extract camera data from it.
I may not be able to use this particular video, and would have to make another shoot.
There is no real story here, more or less VIS-WORK attempt. But a i have a few film directors, who are my friends, may be i will ask them to help with shot composition.