INTRO

An explanation of how Curaya was created, containing a lot of good tips when creating jungle-imagery in Vue.

This way of creating jungle-imagery isn’t the way it should be done. It’s a way it can be done...

SPECIAL VEGETATION

POSITIONING THE PLANTS

Placing my vegetation wasn’t that difficult. I knew the Papaya should be the center-object and that some palmtrees should make the canopy. I also added some Eucalyptus for diversity and to complete the composition I used a Cashews for a kind of “mangrove feeling”.
I also added some of the landscape using rocks at this point.

I just used a standard atmosphere in the beginning.

THE BACKGROUND

Just like in Araguaia I wouldn’t want any sky to be seen. That would rob the image the of the feeling of being in a deep jungle.
I therefore made a “wall” of rural maples in the background, but you could still see the sky here and there.
To get rid of this I made a terrain, tilted it and gave it a cliff-texture.

The cliffs are better than the method of using a big, black box like in Araguia. If the background (the cliffs) can be seen, it still looks complex and realistic instead of just pure darkness when using a box. In Curaya this detail is almost redundant as ruralmaples cover the most of the background, but in many other cases, it can help you enormeously.

THE ATMOSPHERE

Instead of just using a standard Vue-atmosphere and letting a volumetric spot-light create the fog, I this time took advantage of Vue’s atmospheric features and used the fog and haze a lot. This gave me a lot more control over the colours and the haze.
The atmosphere would create the “haze” and “humidity”, while the secondary lights' only purpose was to lighten up the scene this time.

In the Araguaia-method, the spotlight was volumetric and was therefore the only source that created the humid feel. Because of this, the fog does in many pictures created with this method, look like a cone turned upside down which isn't what we want!.

You can download the atmosphere in the 3Dmodels-section.

LIGHTING

When looking at photographs from rainforest and such, you’ll quickly discover that true for almost all of them is a very strong highlight and very dark shadows.
The highlight can be achieved with pointlights, and the dark shadows by removing all ambient light from the atmosphere.
I created a very stong poinlight (power: 850) and positioned it not very high above the scene. This is the “strong” highlight.
I then added a few very low-power spotlights (power: 10) to light up some of the trees and reveal some detail.

This was actually the only lighting I did when making this scene. Pretty simple. Only 5 lights + sunlight + a bit of work in the atmosphere-editor.
For comparison: I used 21 lights in Chinahouse and 25 in Kastro

The lights reveal A LOT of detail, adds colour etc. It brings the whole picture to life! Therefore, spend much time getting your lights right - it’s essential for the final render!

ADDITIONALVEGETATION

Of course, there’s a lot more foliage in the real jungle than palmtrees and mangrove, and that’s the next thing to create.
I added a few more rural maples to cover up some holes that became visible when the lights were added.
From Wallis Eck Downloads I used the potpalmplant.
I also used a fern, created by myself (which can be downloaded in the 3Dmodels-section).
I used alphaplanes for the grass.