Pretty basic stuff I know but I’ve got a scene I’m trying to make look like the following reference picture.
Obviously my current render looks pretty awful. Key points are lighting and DOF. Any tips you can give me for these to improve my current scene?
I’m also going to add water droplets into mine. I’ve modelled one using a UV sphere, given it a subdivision surface modifier and set the IOR to 1.33. Anything else I should be doing to give it more realism?
This is a very good project to undertake, arumiat! It is a very simple idea, but I’m sure you will find many aspects with which to learn new techniques.
You’ve said your key points are lighting and depth of field. In my opinion, a good starting point for the lighting would probably be a simple sun lamp and a sky to give the scene an appropriate atmosphere lighting. You could also use an HDRI map to achieve this, but if you’re going for direct lighting instead of diffuse lighting (like on a cloudy day), HDRI will make your work slightly more difficult.
As for the depth of field, I find the easiest method is to add an empty to the scene, name is something easy to remember (empty_focus), and in the camera properties, set the focus object as the empty. Then wherever you move the empty in the scene, your hyperfocal point will be right there. Then it is a simple matter of adjusting the settings of the DoF.
I think to get a very realistic image, you will have to also take into consideration some other factors. At this close of a view, you are going to have to model your blades of grass with thickness. You can probably just apply the “solidify” modifier to create this. Granted, it will be a very slim thickness, but I think you are going to see a big difference in the believability of the scene with it. This will also help with making your shaders more believable, as they will probably require actual volume to look correct (at least if you are using a translucent/transparent material).
I hope some of these ideas may help you, I’m looking forward to seeing where you take this image!
Hi James, thanks! Here’s take 2. The thing on the grass blade is supposed to be a parasitic larva, modelled w glass material.
I did indeed apply a solidify modifier to the grass blades which I think works but if I were to start again I’d probably just model the base mesh thicker so I have control over the edges & pointed tip thickness, as the modifier makes the thickness uniform throughout so it was difficult to get a compromise between the body being thick enough & the edges/ tip being thin enough.
It was fun playing around with the defocus node. I ended up looking at some EXIF data from similar photos on Flickr to guide me as to f-stop and camera perspective. In terms of max blur I’m currently using 4.9 with a threshold of 1.000.
Things I wish for the current scener would be for the forefront grass blade to be perfectly in-focus throughout which I couldn’t get whilst keeping the background blades completely out of focus.
Secondly there are some nasty blur artefacts in terms of hard steps, which again I struggled with whilst keeping the overall DoF composition. Anyway, was a great learning exercise & will probably do for my purposes!
One thing I’m trying to do is to get a vignette effect as well. I’ve set this up with an ellipse mask in the compositor but I can only either get one or the other in terms of DoF or vignette, is the Mix node the wrong one to be using just before the output Composite?
Hi,
why not play with the DoF on the camera rather than composer? Then you will not experience the artifacts you don’t like.
Correct me if I’m wrong, but I guess you don’t have a sun lamp in the scene, or it’s not bright enough. Your grass receives only ambient light. To get that high contrast from the reference photo you should make your sun stronger. Right now it looks like the sky is quite clear, but the grass in scene is in a shadow of something.
For realism: you could also add a bump map or even a displace modifier to make those parallel ripples that go along the blades.
For more realism: the larva looks heavy, but the grass blade doesn’t bend at all.
For even more realism: it’s a sunny day on a medow - some dust in the air wouldn’t hurt. Take a look at the floating dust tutorial by Andrew price here: http://youtu.be/0cyUupgsQl0?t=27m4s
I’m making some plant related project myself right now and I’m very interested in your results here
Cheers!
I’m going to toss two-cents in here and suggest that one reason the reference image is so attractive despite there being so little to it is the fact that a diagonal composition exists. The blades are more heavily populated at left and thin toward the right. Any other choices you make might benefit from imitating that - the parasitic larva can then be staged on a blade of grass top-right to convey achievement or low-left to convey a darker inevitability. Just a thought; overall, the scene is a great tooth-sharpener for learning lots of techniques! Good pick.
Lech I tried using the particle system to create dust but I think the plane that Andrew is using in the tutorial is messing with my final render and introducing artefacts so I disabled it… Also I’m using such a wide open aperture the particles were barely registering in the final render anyway. I attached an example to show you what I mean…
I figured out how to add the vignette as well using this node combination. Is this the standard?
Nice progress. Too bad the tutorial wasn’t much of a help, I get your point. I like how the grass blade with the bug stands out.
There’s another idea you could perhaps find useful: the blades on the photo are bent in two ways: along the blade (just like the gravitation bends them) and also perpendicularly (so the blade is not just a long plane - it’s rather a long section of a tube). Plus, they are oftenly twisted. Each grass leaf of yours has a quite uniform angle to the sun, so each of them has moderately uniform shade. The blades on the photo - because of their twofold curvature and twist - have gradients of shades. Perhaps you could try playing with the shape of the grass leaves… are they generated by a particle system? then this should not be very hard. Cheers!
