Dao Vi’s concept art imagined a fantasy garden where dragon-shaped fountains rise beside a mountain spring. Rebecca Ma, a 3D environment artist with a background in mechanical engineering and film, spent a 16-week term project at Think Tank Training Centre turning that painting into a fully realized, lit, simulated 3D scene — and in a new interview published October 28, she walks through exactly how, with a level of tool-by-tool detail that doubles as a procedural-texturing masterclass.
The piece she describes first surfaced publicly in an earlier write-up on October 1; this interview goes considerably further into process than that first look did, which is the actual reason it earns a second piece rather than repeating the first.
The dragons started in ZBrush — sculpted, then reduced with Decimation Master and the Make 3D alpha tool to get the polygon count somewhere a game-film pipeline could actually use. Terrain came from Gaea, built around erosion simulation rather than hand-sculpted, which is why the rock looks weathered rather than designed. Vegetation scattering used SpeedTree, with wind animation layered in afterward so nothing in the frame reads as static.
The headline claim, in Ma’s own words: “Almost all of my assets were textured procedurally without UVs.” Instead of unwrapping geometry and painting maps, she layered materials with V-Ray’s procedural nodes — Bercon Noise, Dirt, Falloff — applied via triplanar projection, which maps a texture from three axes simultaneously so it doesn’t need a seam-free unwrap to look right on organic, irregular shapes like dragon scales or eroded rock. The one hand-painted exception was a mask controlling river displacement, done in Photoshop, where procedural noise alone couldn’t dictate exactly where the water should carve the terrain.
Houdini did the heavy simulation work: scatter-and-align for vegetation placement, FLIP solvers for the water and whitewater at the fountains, Cloud Shape Generate plus noise nodes for the fog drifting through the scene. Ma tried Vellum for grass animation and dropped it — the motion read as too subtle to register in the final shot, a small, honest admission that not every simulation tool earns its place in a finished frame. Maya handled scene assembly and V-Ray rendering; Nuke did the compositing pass, including god rays and final color grading.
The result is a scene built almost entirely from procedural and node-based systems rather than hand-authored detail — the dragons are sculpted, but nearly everything around them (texture, vegetation placement, water, fog, even the final light) is generated by rules Ma set up rather than painted by hand one surface at a time. That’s the actual argument the interview makes for procedural texturing as a technique: not that it’s faster, necessarily, but that it scales to a scene this dense in a way manual UV painting would not.