“Interactive Environment Creation with Sprout”
Conference:
Type(s):
Entry Number: 52
Title:
- Interactive Environment Creation with Sprout
Presenter(s)/Author(s):
Abstract:
Sprout is our proprietary Maya-based tool for hand-dressing digital environments with large quantities of high-resolution assets like trees, plants and rocks.
It was developed at Sony Picture Imageworks (SPI) to address the need for an interactive artist-friendly tool that was fully integrated into SPIfis existing pipeline. Prior to the development of Sprout, environment dressing at SPI was done primarily in Houdini or procedurally at render-time and was thus the province of FX TDs.
In Sprout, artists can load any asset and quickly fipaintfi instances onto any other geometry using a brush paradigm familiar to anyone who has used Photoshop. Sophisticated lightweight OpenGL representations keep performance nimble, and all instances remain fully editable by the artist to allow for highly art-directed environment dressing.
Sprout has made environment dressing at SPI available to a larger variety of artists, being leveraged most recently for photoreal jungle environments for an upcoming VFX motion picture as shown in Figure 1.
Keyword(s):
Acknowledgements:
We are grateful to Daniel Canfora and Xavier Roig for their great ideas and pushing this project forward, as well as to Dustin Wicke who came up with the awesome name and idea to develop such a tool in the first place.
