3d art

Rendering and post-production
Creating and tweaking the final scene
Environment
n
14 Final rendering
Render settings are based
on a sensitive balance
between quality and speed.
Anti-aliasing: 4/256 rays
were used for both object
and texture AA. With a
quality setting of 45% this
provided good results and
reasonably fast render.
Settings like motion blur,
DOF and blurred reflection
were disabled, as they didn’t apply to this scene and
would have only increased render time. Advanced effects
were left at the default 46%, as the GR and Atmosphere
settings were tweaked independently. The scene took
exactly 33h42’38” to render at 3000×1688 n.
15 Post-production – corrections
After finishing a render, my next step is always launching
Photoshop and making some minor corrections (contrast,
colour, levels etc) on the final render. It gives me more
control over the final result, and some clever steps can do
wonders to the image. My first step was adjusting the
contrast in the most simple way, by hitting Auto Contrast.
Then I duplicated the background layer, and applied Auto
Color and Auto Tone on the copy, then changed its
Opacity to 65%, where I liked the image the most. After
merging the layers, I needed to reduce noise a bit o.
16 Adding more magic
The following technique is based on one of GeekAtPlay’s
tutorials, and I apply it in 95% of my work. In a mysterious
forest scene this method works very well, since it adds
more magic to the render.
Basically I duplicated the background layer twice,
applied Gaussian blur with a 4.2px radius on the two
copied layers, set the second layer’s blending mode to
Multiply, and the third layer’s to Overlay. I adjusted their
opacities to 20-20%, and got the result I wanted.
I added a very little soft light with brush to the darker
areas, and finally I added a new layer, rendered clouds
(with foreground and background colour black and white),
hit Difference clouds, set the blending mode to Soft light,
and the opacity to 18%. With this step I added some very
subtle, soft shadows to the picture p.
n A screenshot of the custom
render settings that I used for
the final render
o This is how the image looked
after contrast and colour
corrections. The changes are
minor, but the picture looks
quite different
p Almost ready. You can see
how the technique I described
works on a fairy-tale-like render
o
q ...and here is the final image
after post-work
p
17 Final steps
I was just a few steps away
from getting the desired
result. Since the previous
technique makes the
colours more saturated, I
needed to desaturate reds
a bit. I adjusted Levels, and
finally I used the Clone tool
for minor corrections q.
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