Reference & Inspiration

My Pacific Northwest Forest is a scene that I created for Jeremy Huxley’s Vegetation and Plants for Games course through CGMA. I’m originally from the Seattle area, so after several years in Los Angeles for school, I wanted to recreate a lush, green, and mossy piece of home that I could carry around in my back pocket. I definitely took inspiration from memories of one of my favorite childhood locations, Farrel McWhirter Park, and the forest and creek that encompassed the majority of the trails—but I didn’t try to specifically recreate anything 1:1, knowing that I probably wouldn’t have the time to get it as perfect as I wanted.

I did want to be accurate to the plants I remembered from growing up, so I did a lot of reference gathering and research around common trees and groundcover like Western Red Cedar, Sword Ferns, and Salal. My mom was a fantastic resource in this, as she’s an avid gardener and lover of native plants, and I think this project really helped her understand what ‘weird’ thing I was doing over here with computers. It also meant I got lots of nice additional photos of plants from our backyard to work from, and not just shots I could find on the web, so bonus!