This past summer I was working on a freelance project that involved modeling an area of downtown Huntington, IN for visualization. For more on this project, visit http://www.neilzehr.com/environments/pages/downtown.html .

I used reference photos to model several of the buildings in detail and a satellite image to get the layout of several blocks. After doing all of the modeling in Maya, I brought them into Vue for some landscaping and lighting.

Here are some of those renders:

I’m in the process of working on a new landscape image. I wanted to do a scene with a view of a lake in the middle of a sunset with a bird preparing to land in the water. I came accross this image of a lake that inspired me.

Then I started working on trying to make a sunset and the lake landscape in Vue. Here is what I have come up with so far. I plan on working on the lighting and sky some more, adding more vegitation and rockiness to the lake, and hopefully model and texture some kind of ducklike creature landing.

I recently worked on a scene of a fancy country estate home. The first two images are photos I found that had the kind of feel I wanted for my house.

This next image is the piano model that I built in Maya with the help of my photo reference and a chart of piano keys.

The next image was a test render of my country estate home in Vue to see how my textures were looking.

Once I was happy with my house, I worked on the lighting, put some plants in the pots, and built a landscape for the image. I also used a grass texture for this that I made in photoshop to get the look I wanted for the grass.

Once I saw how this final image came out, I felt like the front porch was too rough and bumpy. Also, I wanted to try a different lighting situation with some soft shadows and light breaking from behind through the tree. Here is what I ended up with.

I have been working on using the digital landscape program Vue along with models that I make in Maya. Using these two programs together, I have enjoyed being able to do whatever kind of landscapes I want.

This is a scene I built of a cabin out in the middle of nowhere.

The first image was a test render to see how my lighting of the scene and texturing of the cabin was coming.

The next image is after I put in a fence, built the rest of the landscape in Vue, and worked with the lighting some more. I experimented with creating my own grass and leaf textures in photoshop.

The last image was an alternate lighting scene to show a brighter day and to show off the texture on the chimney better.