Two explorers barrel down an alien valley, a dreadful storm brewing on one end, new worlds to escape to on the other.

This project has been a technical test of sorts and it's also serving as a concept for a story I'm working on. The only post work on these shots was an ACES color conversion and color grading. The trees and all of their leaves/needles are instanced geometry, enough of a memory savings that I could render on my GPU. The terrain erosion, foliage scattering, cloud generation, procedural planets, and VFX were all things I created in Houdini. The ships were quick concepts I banged out in Zbrush and textured in Substance Painter. The materials I designed in Substance Designer and with a little help from Substance Alchemist.

This is a project I resurrected after a year-long hiatus from art and creating, and there are things I would change in hindsight but I'm happy to be doing this again with a healthy mind and I think I'm heading in the right direction.