Originally published at: http://cabins.ronenbekerman.com/project/cape-mountain-cabin-by-richard-stevenson/
I rendered everything with Redshift and all the models and foliage were created from the ground up using Megascans assets.
A huge thanks to Ronen for organizing this as well as to the sponsors for bringing the community together for the challenge.
Seeing this for the first time it looked to me like something out of Unreal Engine or Unity. @richst42 can you tell us a bit about the process with Reshift?
Hey Ronen, this was my first big project using Redshift so had to learn a lot to get going. I spent a huge amount of time on rnd and pipeline dev and maybe not enough time on the final shots, but learning new skills was my aim here so I’m pretty happy with the result.
One of my favorite features about Redshift is it’s ability to create nested instancers. So you could create a leaf, instance that to some branches, proxy that out, instance that and so on until you have an entire forest using just a few building blocks. Super fast to iterate and super fast to render. Other than that, the speed of Redshift allows for some really intuitive shader and lighting refinement using the IPR which was a huge help for this project.
I’m very happy CABINS was the trigger for you learning Redshift! I’d love it if you can share more of your process 
A big part of the process was also creating all of the foliage.
For this I used a script in Maya to automatically cut out the atlas cards, then prep and send them to 3dsmax for use in GrowFX using as much reference as I could find (I used a great little app called Pureref for this).
From there I had a separate script to help with creating variations and adding wind animation then send back to Maya with correct shaders. A little conversion tool in Maya then fixed any shader issues and made sure the animation cache from GrowFX looped seamlessly.
This was fairly finicky at first but after automating the process it went pretty smoothly for generating large amounts of foliage types.
Towards the end I had to unfortunately drop the foliage animation due to some technical issues but hopefully by the next project I’ll have fixed those issues nailed down 
Hi Richard, the image has a lot of potential although I would add a little more space at the top to give more air to the still image, or open a little the field of view.
The vegetation and the environment looks excellent. Congratulations!
Hey David, thanks for the kind feedback. I agree, composition of the shots is definitely an area that I feel could be greatly improved. The image here was a wide aspect ratio just to save some render time for the animation so I think rendering a few 3x4 stills would have helped with the composition a lot!
the animation is looking so sharp and realistic! nice work!
