Cristiano Siqueira is a Technical Artist in Graphics Research at Intel Labs, where he focuses on producing datasets and designing model workloads to advance real-time rendering.
Highlights:
- Jungle Ruins is a large-scale natural environment scene inspired by the Amazon rainforest.
- We are excited to release Jungle Ruins under a Creative Commons license and invite the broader research and creative community to explore and build upon our work.
Welcome to Jungle Ruins, a large-scale natural environment scene inspired by the Amazon rainforest. This scene demonstrates advanced workflows in content creation tailored to large-scale natural environment design.
[Fig 1.] Camera Shot – Jungle Ruins
Creating a Virtual Sandbox
Real-time path tracing has made remarkable strides in recent years, enabling unprecedented levels of visual fidelity. However, developing and validating these technologies requires complex, challenging datasets that push their limits.
To meet this need, we envisioned Jungle Ruins as a dense, lifelike rainforest environment – a sandbox for integrating and stress-testing our research while providing a visually rich scene for creative exploration. It offers a foundation for advanced workflows, optimizing rendering techniques, and creating expansive virtual worlds.
[Fig 2.] Drone view – Jungle Ruins
Behind the Scenes: Workflow Insights
Creating Jungle Ruins was a journey of intricate planning and creative problem-solving. Here is a glimpse into our workflow:
1. Conceptualization and Research:
The journey began by identifying the rendering features and techniques we wanted to showcase. With this focus in mind, we conducted extensive research to translate technical details into creative ideas and visuals that would best suit the project's needs. We drew significant inspiration from the Amazon rainforest, utilizing nature documentaries, photographs, and AI-generated concept art to set the stage for the next phases.
Credits: AlfredoGiordano/Adobe Stock, pangamedia/Adobe Stock, anna1111986/Adobe Stock, Curioso.Photography /Adobe Stock.
[Fig 4.] A collection of AI-generated reference pictures.
Credits: Влада Яковенко/Adobe Stock, Thiago/Adobe Stock, Thiago/Adobe Stock.
2. Asset Building
Building this expansive environment required a meticulous approach, wherein we had to balance artistic ambition with technical constraints. To achieve this, we focused on modular design and procedural generation as cornerstones of our workflow:
- Terrain
The terrain forms the foundation of Jungle Ruins, spanning an 8Kx8K procedural landscape, which equates to approximately ~64km2 on a real-world scale. Early in the process, it became evident that treating this vast surface as a single monolithic object would be inefficient. To address this, we divided the terrain into 64 individual 1km2 tile sets, enabling precise control over scattering while improving viewport responsiveness. Further subdivision allowed for even finer adjustments and faster iterative scattering optimizations within the high-detail innermost region.
[Fig 5.] Jungle Ruins terrain. - Foliage
To create a diverse and realistic forest, we categorized vegetation into three buckets:- High: Canopy trees dominate the scene, shaping its verticality.
- Medium: Medium-sized trees add density and variety.
- Low: Seedlings, shrubs, and groundcover vegetations enrich the forest floor.
To build these assets, we adopted a modular design philosophy, where atomic assets (e.g., individual leaves and branches) were generated procedurally and reused across families of vegetation. For instance, a single procedural leaf generator produced a variety of styles, which were then shared among plants and trees of the same family, ensuring visual consistency and reducing manual workload. The example below illustrates this process for the River Birch family, showing the growth from seedling, sapling, and mature trees built from the same node graphs.
[Fig 6.] River Birch family – seedling, sapling, and mature tree – in Jungle Ruins
Procedural node trees enabled us to streamline the creation of assets across all vegetation categories. By introducing seed parameters, we more efficiently generated countless variations, controlling attributes from the root structures to the twigs without manually looping through the whole pipeline each time. This approach accelerated the creation of baseline assets, allowing us to populate the forest quickly and efficiently.
3. Bringing It All Together:
Using Blender as the hub application, we imported the baseline assets and began compositing the scene.
As outlined earlier, the terrain was divided into multiple tile sets, granting precise control over foliage scattering. This approach eliminated the need to rely on viewport features such as camera culling or geometry simplification with convex hulls or point clouds. We used full-resolution geometry for scattering to ensure that each tile maintained its natural complexity, thus supporting the visual fidelity of the overall environment. Below is an image illustrating how one tile set appears with its scattering systems activated.
Foliage scattering helped to effectively complete the scene and prepare the project for broader applications.
Challenges and Opportunities
Jungle Ruins highlighted several challenges, as well as ideas and opportunities for future exploration. For example, creating the forest floor and terrain cliffs required trade-offs between fidelity and scalability, pointing to the need for more robust systems. Solving such challenges could inspire new directions in content creation and rendering technologies and pave the way for even more refined environments in the future.
[Fig 8.] A collection of forest floor and cliff reference imagery.
Credits: Tarcisio Schnaider/Adobe Stock, Mirek/Adobe Stock, Stephen/Adobe Stock, kellyvandellen/Adobe Stock.
A Canvas of Endless Exploration
Jungle Ruins is an ever-evolving series that continuously pushes the boundaries of content creation and consumption. Originally envisioned as a lifelike representation of the Amazon rainforest, it has grown into a dynamic testing ground for innovative workflows in content creation and real-time graphics research and development. Each iteration introduces new elements and a new set of challenges.
[Fig 9.] Sketch terrain – Jungle Ruins
Conclusion
In line with our commitment to open software, we are excited to release Jungle Ruins under a Creative Commons license, inviting the broader research and creative community to explore and build upon our work. GPU Research Samples - Jungle Ruins
We invite you to share your experiences and feedback as you explore Jungle Ruins, helping us refine and inspire the next steps in virtual scene creation.