My largest set and responsibility on the film was Clade Farms, the home of the main characters, in the first act and epilogue of the film. Although some early work had been done before my roll-on, I was given me a lot of freedom to explore the look of the farms area. There was a lot of great visual development work as well for inspiration. We aimed to give it a lush, slightly wild look, with a lot of variations in the hues and colors. I also tried to simplify some of the patterns and surfaces on the structures (I primarily worked on the barn and the house). Note that there are a lot of parts with surfacing from other artists such as the main look of the fields themselves, the first pass texturing on the windmill in the back, bg trees, or other various areas where other artists contributed, and I built on after the fact / as needed.
Here are a couple work-in-progress lookdev stills I got approved to show:
The door handles weren’t polished at this point along with a few other refinements, but you can see some of the stylized approach to the texturing primarily in the brick reveal on the plaster. I gave it a mix of soft and hard edges as opposed to the layers you get in reality, and the brick texture/shapes themselves were hand sculpted in ZBrush with simplified colors afterwards — you could see them more clearly in the back, but that didn’t end up being clearly shown in the final film.
I emphasized the color richness and size variations in the moss to give a bit of a feeling of magical realism. You can also tell on the roof patterning where I kept it organic and simplified.
Below are some assorted final stills.
Built procedural grass animation system to lower the burden on FX, setting up variants depending on shot action.
Example of shot work where a carved out path with custom instancing was needed due to art direction.
