This is an album cover i’m working on. Basically the artists will be in the front of the scene and the forest with a big moon will be behind. Currently i’ve done only the forest(well, almost done) and some base meshes for the characters.
The main goals are:
Photorealism
The scene looks like it was at night (i’m not sure how to write this, hahahah)
So i need suggestions and criticisms. Thank you for your help!. Excuse my english mistakes.
Oh! This is my first post on this site
Now, the render (current work)
Render time : 15 mins ( 100 samples / 1000 x 1000px )
you know, making a night image is tricky, you can’t rely on darkness to illustrate the night, you can’t make the image too dark, instead, you need to use bright but usually weak light sources to give the impression of darkness, something familiar to the viewers, something that they know how bright it is comparing to the sun light, such as a torch, camp fire, lantern, the moon etc. When these light sources become the main light and illuminate the scene and there is no sun, the viewers will have a feeling it’s night.
Since you already plan to put a moon behind the artist, i suggest that you try changing the main light to the back, sharpen the shadow by decreasing the size of your sun lamp (you know, the moon create quite a sharp shadow), draw a moon in the sky, then darken the shadow part to almost black, also make the scene look cold. Right now your scene look like it’s early in the morning.
About your photorealism, i think it’s really great already
Hi Ssendam, about the light source, i think i need to work very hard on it. I forgot to mention i will add some torches in front of the forest to illuminate the characters. As you say i will change the key light to the back and darken the shadows.
Thank you for your suggestions, i really appreciate them. I’ll upload a new render, as soon as I change those things.
I did it putting the Z pass in the Map Value Node then i used the Mix node (Add blend mode) to mix a color with the render
Only a sun lamp to mimic the moonlight and a night HDR environment map.
Sapling addon.
That was a bit tricky, since you need to set a hight level of subdivisions for the displacement. Also i used normal map, occlussion map, specular map, obviously diffuse map, and a displace map ( if you set a enought level of subdivisions then you won’t need to fake the occlussion using occlussion map since the mesh create self-occlusion and self-shadowing because the displacement modifier).
I made the ground(soil and little rocks) with the textures i mentioned before, and the leaves, grass, dead grass and little branches with lots of particles. Because of the requirements of particles and the polygon count i needed to reach a good level of detail, I was forced to buy more RAM ( 8gb for me was enought). So the answer is both.
Only one(I duplicated the same object then applied different scales and rotations to each to save memory), the leaves on the trees were generated by IVY Gen addon.
The render looks good–the trees are organic and their placement feels natural. The ground in front gives the sense of a path rather than a typical forest floor. Was that the intent? Normally I would expect more clutter, such as fallen branches, moss-covered rocks, tangled vines, hummocky ground, and so forth. But it seems fine as it is.
Hi rjshae. About the path, I did it intentionally. The scene has some of those things that you mention but i think it needs more clutter because it looks a little bit clean yet.
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