For this piece, I wanted to focus on improving various skills, but the most important ones were matte painting projections in Nuke, working with MASH in Maya to scatter trees, and using the ACES workflow.

I started by gathering references; I was aiming for a cold, moody, and foggy atmosphere, so Game of Thrones was a big inspiration. After selecting the right photographs to work with, I began modeling the basic terrains in Maya and created a simple camera animation to establish the scale of the world.

Next, I brought the terrains into World Machine to generate more detailed landscapes. I then imported them into ZBrush to create different resolution versions of the scene, so my laptop could handle the project more efficiently.

I modeled the trees in SpeedTree and scattered them using MASH in Maya, setting up different ecosystems. For the buildings, I used a Kitbash3D set and added lighting to the houses to enhance the mood of the scene.

I rendered the foreground and midground, and painted the background in Photoshop—this included the sky, clouds, and distant mountains. Afterward, I projected all the elements in Nuke. It was a bit tedious since it was my first time doing this kind of projection work, but it was a great learning experience.

Finally, I did some color grading and composited birds into the scene to add more life and motion.