Interactive environment creation with sprout

Abstract

Sprout is our proprietary Maya-based tool for hand-dressing digital environments with large quantities of high-resolution assets like trees, plants and rocks. It was developed at Sony Picture Imageworks (SPI) to address the need for an interactive artist-friendly tool that was fully integrated into SPIfis existing pipeline. Prior to the development of Sprout, environment dressing at SPI was done primarily in Houdini or procedurally at render-time and was thus the province of FX TDs. In Sprout, artists can load any asset and quickly fipaintfi instances onto any other geometry using a brush paradigm familiar to anyone who has used Photoshop. Sophisticated lightweight OpenGL representations keep performance nimble, and all instances remain fully editable by the artist to allow for highly art-directed environment dressing. Sprout has made environment dressing at SPI available to a larger variety of artists, being leveraged most recently for photoreal jungle environments for an upcoming VFX motion picture as shown in Figure 1.