River Village

Inspired by different floating villages in South-East Asia and China, I set out to make a floating village myself in CG. The Scene Contains some dozen hand made props, tools and buildings, as well as some custom animations and effects.

One of the tools I created was a custom barnacle generator. This allowed me to add barnacles onto any object quickly and, using an empty, I could decide where and how the barnacles spawned. I had two versions, one was geometry based, the other shader based. I used to geometry based method for barnacles close to camera and the shader version for further objects.

I also created a bird flocking generator, which allowed me to simply draw a line and have a flock of birds follow it.

The final tool I created was a water level shader. The shader was used to integrate my props into the water as if it had just become low tide, but the water lines were still visible along most objects from when the water was higher. It is fully shader based and allowed me to simply add one node to my stack in order to simulate the previous water level.

All of the houses and about 98% of the props in the scene were created by me. The woman rowing the boat in the middle of the river was animated using a mix of inverse kinematics, constraints, and some other methods

I am most proud of the water, which was made using a mix of different wave textures, noise textures, musgrave textures, and more in order to create a dynamic and realistic looking water ecosystem.