Building Natural Environments Using Gaea & Houdini

The Gnomon Workshop has released Building Natural Environments Using Gaea & Houdini, a guide to current environment art and matte painting workflows.

The workshop, recorded by Senior Environment TD Rasha Shalaby, provides over four hours of training in terrain design tool Gaea, procedural 3D software Houdini, and the V-Ray renderer.

An essential guide to creating natural environments for VFX and game cinematics
In the workshop, Shalaby reveals how to create a natural environment based on a real location: the deserts of Sinai and the Red Sea Mountains.

The tutorial covers the entire workflow, from creating base low-detail assets to creating hero camera angles, updating and optimizing assets, and adding scattered elements.

Shalaby uses Gaea to create the terrains and to output textures, and Houdini to set up the environment, extract displacement maps, and to create layered shaders for the V-Ray renders.

As well as the technical aspects of the work, Shalaby covers the importance of using reference material, and the techniques used by artists in production, demonstrating how environments go through iterations as the level of detail of each asset is progressively updated.

As well as the tutorial videos, viewers of the workshop can download Shalaby’s Gaea .tor files.

About the artist
Rasha Shalaby has been working in the entertainment industry since 1998 as a Visual Effects Art Director, Environment Artist, Matte Painter and Compositor.

Her film credits include The Lord of the Rings movies, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo and Argo, along with countless commercials and several game cinematics.

Pricing and availability
Building Natural Environments Using Gaea & Houdini is available via a subscription to The Gnomon Workshop, which provides access to over 300 tutorials.

Subscriptions cost $57/month or $519/year. Free trials are available.

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