Environment creation with THE Experts

DNEG Envgen supervisor Johnny Grilo details how a photorealistic night-time environment of the area from Point Bonita to Golden Gate Bridge was created for Venom

1. Start with a good base:

For this specific environment in Venom, the environment team received early shots from the client exploring times of day, location and ocean patterns. LIDAR, photoscans, DEM, or even just a proxy model will give you a good base that can be used to block out where your assets should be. For the Golden Gate Bridge we started with a LIDAR provided by the client and made sure its scale was correct with our pipeline.

2. Work with the model:

Using Maya we blocked out new sections and removed unneeded ones. The blocking was locked before anything started. We do LODS of the mesh and do the operations on the lowest LOD, then apply that to the high-res mesh. Since the area we wanted was wide – around 4km – we wanted to get the best detail possible, but in a manageable way. From a top-down view, we separate the terrain in logical sections so everything is a bit easier on the processing. We use curves that we ray cast down to the terrain, and they are the placed where the cut happens.

3. Add complexity and detail:

We used a couple of different methods to up-res and add detail to the mesh. One of them was converting the meshes into height fields in Houdini. That allowed us to keep the shape and easily retopologise the meshes. After that, we were able to run erode and slump processes, to add more natural detail to the meshes, and they were Uv’ed using UDIMS. We also used 3D sculpting software to manually add in extra details along with projected reference photos from the location.

4. texture time:

We baked a first pass of texture into the mesh, so we could up-res even more, while being informed about the type of surface we are trying to detail. Then we did a first texture pass in Mari by simply projecting photos onto our meshes to help make quick decisions when blocking out the geometry. When the model was finished, we extracted masks from the photos we had of the location and used those masks to determine where higher-resolution textures would appear. We then baked ambient occlusion, cavity and curvature passes, which helped us to get the right albedo.

5. Environment ecosystem:

We listed the species and their variations from the reference, defined where they grow, how much they grow and their different hues. We used a lot of procedural workflows in Clarisse and Houdini to create the ecosystem that would distribute and vary the species naturally, based on the reference. We would calculate where the sun rises and sets, so we could define where most of the vegetation is taller or shorter. Slopes and proximity to the water would also shape the ecosystem. Anything large scale we broke down into manageable chunks. We had a scattered ecosystem for trees, grass, rocks and small-scale detail dressing.

6. final steps:

After the ecosystem was blocked out, we then went for a refining pass where we manually placed assets to art direct a more natural look and remove any procedurally introduced artefacts. The final shots served as the backdrop for the dramatic fight scene in Venom, in which the lead character and another symbiote, Riot, confront each other on a rocket platform. These frames show the daytime and night-time work-in-progress realisations of our environment work for the sequence.