Rendering

After setting up textures, lights and renders, I made a quick animation of my scene including my tumbleweed. Unfortunately, due to really low processing power of my machine, Maya couldn't handle animating the tumbleweed itself! I created a sphere of a similar size, knocked up a ramp texture for it, and used that instead.

I used Dynamics for the animation itself, making the tumbleweed nCloth and making changes to mass, wind velocity, friction, etc. I'm happy with the result but would like to try it on a more powerful machine to see what it looks like with my original model.

Maya also couldn't handle playblasting. It could only do one frame before crashing, so I ended up filming the animation on a camera. The textures slowed the animation down to such an extent that I was filming for 11 minutes!

Here are two final images from my scene - the bottom one took 1h20mins to render!

This link shows previs through to the final images:

Digital Environment from Elly Hazael on Vimeo.