Hi All,
Just been on holiday to Nepal and, while the trekking was awesome, I found myself spending a lot of the time going, “I wonder how I could do that in Blender…”
This is part of the result.
I really wanted to push myself to produce better lighting so I spent a lot of time looking at classics and thinking about ‘Notan’. Still need more advice though - any ideas?
Overall it is quite warm and pleasing.
The things that jump out:
The mountain looks like it small and quite close, it should feel larger. Use a mist pass and also scale the mountain way up, and move it back. It is also too smooth and plastic feeling.
The rock steps look fake, the texture used is too flat when viewed steeply. work on the rock material, and give them shome true dipslacment.
leaves on the tree are floating in mid air
sticks in bag are all too similar, make them more jagged, and some should have little branhces coming off them
work on the dress famric, and movement, too flat/perfect.
THe grass hills and the tree flows look quite good, great start!
A great adventure is about to start 
great start!
I would just light up the scene a bit. Add some clouds to make the middle more interesting (play with textures why not) and light up your character also while you are on modifications .
In reality, one cool effect that is easy to put into the scene, is adding depth of field to your camera. Something that simulates f/4 or f/3,5, would make that mountain look more distant.
If you want to simulate an f/2 with creamy blur, should add more details on character and everything that Photox said.
Primarily you should fix the characters integration into the image. Right now it looks like she’s been photoshop-ed into the image, something 90% of blender artists do for some reason. Her posture is also a little bit off. If you want to keep it, you can give her a staff, otherwise, lower her right arm, alternatively raise one of her feet onto the next step which creates a motion, making the arm look more natural as well.
Also put some clouds in the background.
OK thanks for the advice - the character was always meant to be incidental; the mountain was meant to be the focus but I’ve posed the character better, added some detail, made the mountain more detailed and played with the mist pass. Oh and added a displacement modifier to the steps.
Because of the mountain as the focus I don’t want to play too much with dof but I might see how it looks.
Needs to be finished tomorrow so I’ll probably not be adding too much right now…
The characters’s backpack is somewhat under-exposed, as is the left side of his tunic. Also – and I think that this is very important – I do not see his head. The backpack needs to ride a little lower down on his back. The lighting needs to provide very subtle emphasis on this “star of the show” and should also serve to slightly separate him/her from the background.
A simple framing device would be to shoot with a long (“zoom”) lens, positioned farther away, which will produce a “foreshortening” effect that will already be familiar from photographs even if the viewer does not recognize them as such.
