INTRO

While making Quebec, I needed a technique for making the kind of atmosphere I desired, and the technique for creating a huge forest without killing my computer!

THE INSPIRATION

I bought the book Earth, this christmas and it's packed with the most beautiful from photos from all around the world.

One of the Appalachian Mountains caught my attention and inspired me to do something similar in style.


THE COMPOSITION

I started by created the terrains and rocks I needed for the scene. This helped me establish the composition, and let me make alterings without problems.

 


THE FOG AND LIGHTING

The next step was the lighting. I could see from the photo that the trees looked sort of layered because of the fog.

I therefore created an extremely foggy atmosphere for my scene.
I could also see that the strong light from the sun and it's surroundings, made it appear strong and white.

 


COLOUR AND POST-PRODUCTION

A great new feature in Vue Pro is the post-production-features. By adjusting the hue, saturation and the gain-sliders I got closer to the colour-scheme of the photo, and what I intended to create.

The sunlight got stronger and the pale green in the original atmospheret turned into cyan-blue.

 


THE FOREST AND TREES

The next problem was the forest. The only realistic way of creating such a gigantic forest, was to make the trees with alphaplanes.

I spent hours searching the internet for pictures that would work, and creating an alphamap for them. These are some of the ones I've found.

They're not high-resolution, but there was no need for that since they would appear small. The only thing that mattered was the quality of the model and render of the tree.
These trees a from XFrog and are made by Greenworks.

 


PUTTING IT ALL TOGETHER

After that came the massive work of placing all the trees the way I wanted them. Copy/paste was a great help here, but it was still a major time-consumer!

FINISHING TOUCHES

The last things to do was to add the birds, the man and the fog.
Enjoy! :)

 

 

2003 Thomas Krahn