THE CEMETERY

I went to work on my first demo reel piece after a trip to New Orleans with friends. Horror has always been my foremost love, so I decided to tap into the Southern Gothic subgenre and create a swampy, bayou cemetery inspired by the likes of Interview with the Vampire, True Detective, and the Bayou Nwa region of Red Dead Redemption II.

I first began work modeling and texturing a variety of modular assets that I could later arrange as I saw fit. Once I felt satisfied that I’d sculpted enough tombstones, mausoleums, and obelisks to last a lifetime, I sourced some statuary models from Creative Commons sources. However, they needed to be re-textured to fit with my bayou theme, with mossy stonework and heavily verdigrised metals to reflect decades in a warm, moist environment.

Once I had finalized my shot composition, I textured a ground plane in Quixel Mixer, making sure to create depressions where swampy water could pool and provide specular breakup. I also cannibalized some of my own mausoleum assets to place shattered sections of stonework in the mud, implying perhaps old stone paths or maybe long-buried tombs rising to the surface.

I experimented with several different scene layouts and, trying to recreate the cramped labyrinth of a cemetery like Lafayette. Once I’d settled on a rough composition, I integrated a premade camera with motion tracking data attached to it, the goal being to simulate the feeling of a lone explorer walking through the cemetery late at night. The premade shaky camera created a level of realism to the shot - all I needed to do was constrain the camera’s movements to a motion path, winding between the mausoleums.

I then began dressing the set with foliage sourced from Megascans and Speedtree, and it was here that the piece truly came to life. I made sure to arrange the foliage in accordance with what would make logical sense for the scene - various tall grasses mask the intersections between the tombs and the ground plane, while lilies and other flat swap plants grow up from the patches of stagnant water.

During the render, I tried to give each of the major elements of the scene its own three-point lighting setup. In the composting stage, these lights were grouped together into rim, key, and fill lights. I like to start working from rim lights to create a general outline for the important scene features, followed by key lights to generate major shapes of light and dark. Finally, I used my fill lights just to lift various areas out of pitch blackness, while still keeping them mostly in shadow. Volumetric fog, lens moisture and artificial bloom were key here in creating a hot, humid atmosphere, and many of my lights were color-graded towards cool tones.

I certainly feel that this cemetery is one of my strongest pieces, and I’m quite proud of how I was able to combine my own assets along with premade elements to create a scene that feels like but a small portion of a much larger environment. Much of the specifics of this piece, such as the layout and shot composition, were organically discovered during the process, but in the end I am confident that I successfully executed the exact tone and mood that I had set out for.