Shifting back into Maya, I created a separate scene to house the creation of the supporting vegetal materials and other models to be included in the main scene. Starting off, I consulted some botanical references and decided upon a few species that would integrate well within the scene. At this point, I began creating models for the leaves, flowers, branches, rocks, water and portal hubs, etc. For each of these elements, I created libraries of many different shape iterations. At the outset, I shifted the pivot points particularly for the vegetation to take up residence at the beginning of their stems. This was to ensure that they would snap appropriately where I wanted them to go in the next step (Fig.08 – 09).




After finishing up this task, all of the supporting models were imported back into the main scene with each object family being assigned its own layer. Using the Snapping tool along with some animation deformers and duplication, I switched on each layer individually, placing and morphing members of the object families where they would most benefit the composition (Fig.10).