Desert Scene - Suggestions?

hey all,
I think this is my first post on the forums, so cheers to me :slight_smile:
I’m learning Blender for about 9 months now. I have no background in 3D or even in basic doodling. I stumbled into Blender when searching to learn 3D modelling out of curiosity and closure (when i was a teen i wanted to learn 3D Studio Max, and it traumatized me!).
For the last 9 months I’ve been doing all sorts of tutorials on and off (i don’t have much free time). I have several original projects going on, one of them is this desert scene.

The scene is quite basic, but i’m happy with it. Still, something is missing and I want to take it to the next level.
I want to add dust and the illusion of wind to scene. I thought about using the smoke simulator for this but i’m not happy with the results. Any suggestions?

I’ll appreciate every suggestion and critique.
Also, I’ll be happy to answer any question :slight_smile:

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It’s a very nice image. I think your question about dust is interesting. I suppose the thing to use would be the particle engine, perhaps combined with wind, and set for collision. I think you should also start a thread in the particles and simulations subforum to get the specifics of how to do this.

  1. The clouds are too dense, and too many. In deserts, you’d expect to find much less and much thinner clouds.

  2. The sky is too blue.

  3. Because of above issue, the mist looks bad.

  4. You have some weird artifacts along the ridges- the thing’s too low poly.

The clouds look out of place for a couple of reasons. They seem too low for that kind of cumulus, and too puffy and numerous to have formed over the deep sand-dune desert, where there’s not enough moisture for this kind of cloud to commonly occur. Get some refs of the Sahara and the Gobi, and note the kind of clouds that form and under what conditions.

Halo particles can do a pretty good job for blowing dust: Monster Movie

  1. Took your advice and got rid of the volumetric clouds, added a sky dome instead.

  2. I think it depends on the location of the desert i found several references with bluish sky, for example:
    http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_YXWamP8aB5s/TS1LMlcJbII/AAAAAAAABdY/a_ZNKDjr04Y/s1600/desert.jpg
    http://www.itsnature.org/Photos/images/large/desert7.jpg

  3. The mist really wasn’t that great… i decreased it but still it looks odd to me.

  4. you mean the sharp edges? that’s because i created the dunes using a displace modifier with wood texture. no matter how much i high poly the plane, it stays sharp. for good quality dunes i’ll have to model them myself.

didn’t have time yet to try halo particles. i’ll do it over the weekend. i don’t have much experience with particles so i guess it’ll take me a while.

i also changed the coloring of the scene a bit. i felt the previous was too bright and yellowy.

btw, thanks for your comments and suggestions! :slight_smile:

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You might want to do a little sculpting on those edges, but other than that, I almost mistook that thumbnail for a reference pic! Good job!

looks good. Really reminds me of the desert scene in return of the jedi :smiley:

i often see in movies and such streams of flowing sand as the wind blows over the dunes,

this could be acheived with thin curved plane and some kinda flowing dust alpha texture over it.

Also something about your horison seems…off.

The dunes look really good. I think the problem with the horizon is the sky in the distance should be less saturated and deeper blue, not lighter. It gives off the look like there’s a lens filter on the top half of the camera right now. The angle might also be a little too high for the atmosphere effect to look right. Most of the dunes in the picture look like they’re pretty close, but there’s a strong atmosphere effect that begins about halfway across them. The angle on the dunes not in the haze look like they’re more flat across and then suddenly the dunes in the background are a lot higher. That could be part of the trouble.
EDIT: If you’re going for that effect where the horizon is lighter the far dunes should be completely out of the haze more like a mountain range. That’ll contrast with the light sky… so there wouldn’t be any atmospheric effect in that case like in your first reference photo, or very small.

The sand itself looks great though. The shading between the dunes could be improved though. What are you using for lighting setup?

Some camel tracks along the closest ridge would be a nice touch to this.

I agree that the apparent view angle of the sky texture and the landscape do not agree well, making it almost seem as if we’re looking slightly uphill toward the sky. Since that would be along the side of a dune, the modeled dune shapes themselves seem to shrink to a more of a local surface feature. This is emphasized by the canted angle of the horizon, which runs "uphill’ for most viewers (rising in the frame from L to R). The cloudscape itself does not share that slant, creating more conflict between the two image areas.

This kind of mismatch between the perspective of a live action scene (your sky BG) and a CGI scene will almost always result in the viewer noticing something “off” about the composite, even if they can’t explain why in detail.