CyberTree

This scene was made for a contest with the theme "Biomechanical". I would normally do character art for a theme like this, but I thought it would be fun to switch it up. The environment realm is something I haven't dove into a whole lot, so I decided to go with that. The idea was more or less a tree made of cables and emissive leaves. I used TreeIt for the base and layout of the leaf cards. It then turned into a game of trace that tree using a custom curve brush in Zbrush. Having used Unity a fair bit, I chose to build out my scene in it. It was a little easier to control the look of the water, atmosphere, and tree leaves through shaders. I also used the path tracing feature. It really was a mixed bag in terms of positives and negatives. Path tracing looks great, but it doesn't exactly play nice with some of the systems. I end up comping back in leaf particles among a few other things through non path traced renders and images. Had a lot of fun with it. Ready for the next one!