Nerves

I occasionally do landscapes but lately I've been getting more interested in texturing with UDIM workflows. With the help of some online resources I finally found a method that, while not intuitive, does allow for Redshift & Cinema4d to recognize UDIM textures and apply them to objects. It was exciting to get more detail out of my environments and models, but I think for larger scenes my rig is still too slow to handle even smaller resolution UDIM texture sets.

Funnily enough, even though the larger texture resolutions allowed for more realistic scenes, I kind of departed from using realistic environment maps or lighting for something a bit more painterly and diffused. I then contradicted myself again by going in with some post processing and adding some depth of field, chromatic aberration, and lens distortion. I think that for artic scenes, there is already a sense of the otherworld, it's just completely different than the living conditions that most people deal with. In many ways, until recent times, exploring the polar regions was something akin to travelling in space or below the ocean, it's almost completely uninhabitable and alien to what supports life for us. So I think I wanted to play up that feeling with the color of the sky/environment, pushing unrealistic colors and lighting.

My general workflow was to model the objects in Cinema, the bulk of the terrain in Gaea, then take those objects into Houdini for some quick UV remapping. From there everything was shipped into Substance painter and back into Cinema. I used a hand-painted Skybox and key light for the Sun, then took everything in to AE for post processing.