Mall of America
Kicker Manager 2004
Holiday World

The Mountain Flight scene was developed privately by Dirk Bialluch during the production of Back to Gaya to test Maya's new Fluids and newly developed shader and landscape creation tools. The clouds were generated using Mayas Fliud renderer and come from a textured fluid container. The mountain range was created procedurally using a new rock shader named "Crumple", utilizing an additional Maya plug-in to generate the actual geometry. The volumetric Crumple shader was also used for the rock's finer shading structures. Beside the shader and fluids test we wanted to see if pixel noise can be prevented, that occurs when rendering scenes with huge distances, simultaneously using very high detail at close camera proximity. Using a special shading network and by adding extra attributes to the Crumple shader we were able to solve this problem successfully. We covered the rock with snow dependent on the surface's slope by blending between two Crumple based shaders using Maya's Snow shader.