3d art

Environment
h
i
g This shot shows how the scene looked like after the EcoSystem painting.
You can see how these plants and colours brought the scene to life
j
07 Manually placed HD trees
While non-HD trees are perfect for filling the background,
as we are getting closer to the camera, we need to pay more
attention to details and quality. HD trees are much more
detailed and elaborate than non-HD trees, so they are a great
choice for closer views. I placed HD maple trees from the
same pack to the middle and foreground, creating a
somewhat dense forest around the lake g.
08 The centre of attention
The environment was starting to look pretty nice, although
when I viewed it I didn’t know where to look, and the middle
of the scene seemed so empty. When composing a scene, it is
important to place an object, building, larger plant – something
prominent – to the spot where you want to attract the viewer’s
attention. In this composition I followed the Rule of Thirds, and
placed this tiny elven house with a boat onto a small island
with a layer of rocks and a layer of grass ecosystem. This
definitely made the scene more pleasing to the eye h.
09 Fallen leaves on the water surface
To add more detail and to increase the autumn feeling,
I decided to paint some maple leaves to the water surface,
near the lakeside. I took my water, turned its material into
an EcoSystem, and added two Autumn maple leaves I’ve
purchased from Cornucopia3D. To avoid floating leaves,
I set the Offset from surface to -2cm, I set their maximum
rotation to 180%, then I started painting the leaves on the
water. As I was getting farther from the edge of the lake,
I decreased the brush flow and density i.
33 hours
render time
Resolution:
3,000 x 1,688
h In this shot I highlighted
the focal objects to emphasise
their position
i On this screen capture
you can see how I painted
a path of fallen leaves to the
water surface
j Side view and main camera
view with the highlighted far
background terrains
10 No sky visible
I wanted to achieve the feeling of being in the middle of
the forest. For this, I needed to cover the whole sky with
large, densely populated terrains placed to the far
background. I used three horizontally stretched terrains
with a single, dense (87%) layer of non-HD fall maple
trees. The first terrain added more depth and density to
the ground level, and the other two, larger terrains were
rotated to cover the sky j.
Lighting and rendering
Atmosphere and lighting are the key elements in this
scene. The soft, subtle lighting and misty atmosphere give
the fairy-tale mood of the scene, and make it different
from an ordinary shot of an autumn forest. You can use
legendary creatures, buildings or other objects, but
without the right atmosphere, the scene loses its purpose.
Although photorealism was not my goal, I wanted to
make the scene as believable as possible. When it comes
to lighting, Vue’s Global Radiosity (GR) engine is the key,
because – using photon calculations – it can mimic real-life
lighting with reflected light. It is also essential to enable
Indirect Skylighting to get colour-reflected light, and
Optimized for outdoor rendering should be enabled if
making a natural environment.
There is only one disadvantage to GR: since it uses a lot
of calculations, it consumes more system resources, thus
it can increase render time. That’s why I reduced its quality
to -2 while composing the scene – and to -0.5 for the final
render, decreasing render time without visible quality loss.
37