INTRO

A detailed explanation of how Ventura was created, from idea to finished render.


I will try to describe this the best I can, but I won't go into the more technical details. I feel that any of those options and decisions (such as atmosphere settings) should be personal, so I won't tell you excactly what do :)


THE BEGINNING

About one and a half year ago, I made an image called "Ventura". It was quite simple and was inspired by a few photos from Thailand. It was created using only the standard vegetations and textures of Vue d'Esprit. I really like the look of it, but as I've gotten better and better, I've started to feel that it looks a bit "old".

 


NEW MODELS

On of the things I definately needed was some new and better models. XFrog* helped me find just that... There's a package of trees for Xfrog called "Tropical" which suited my needs perfectly. I now had some far better, realistic models to work with.

*Xfrog is a program created for making realistic 3Dplants. It may be a bit hard to learn and use, but you can always buy some of the finished plant-packages Greenworks has made availible.


These trees are all from the Xfrog-package "Tropical".

THE FIRST IDEA.

I didn't want to do a complete remake of the old Ventura. I liked the old scene and didn't want to mess with it. I also felt it looked a bit too much like the "Vue-palmtree-beach-scene" which has been seen far to many times.

I had some ideas of what I wanted to make, so the first thing I did was to draw a quick sketch of what I had in mind, just to get my ideas down on paper. This later helped me achieve my original idea and get rid of any compositorial problems that might have occurred.


THE BASICS

The first thing to do was to build the basic scene. Since the palmtree is the major subject I started by finding a good POV* that would frame it nicely.

I also added the boulders, the beach and the sea, all for the sake of establising the basic composition.


THE SKY

Very early on I also decided to make something special out of the sky. I used a great highquality-photo of a beautiful, blue sky and added it to an alphaplane.

I wanted the sky to look blue, crisp and realistic. I did two things to achieve this.
- First, I went to the "material editor, effects" and set the luminiousity to full. Ambient, contrast and diffuse were all set to 0.

I also adjusted the fog and haze in the atmosphere editor to practically nothing.
I didn't want the sky-plane to become grey and hazy as I moved it back into the horizon.

*Notice the difference between the two pictures. The left one is the standard atmosphere and the right one is the modified one. It looks a lot more like what I was trying to achieve.
**Also note that the sky doesn't meet the water in the horizon perfectly. This can't be fixed in Vue so I did that in postwork afterwards.

 

THE REMAINING VEGETATION

The next thing to do was to add the remaining vegetation. This was quite easy since I already had some great models, and since I pretty much knew where I wanted them to be.

Still, all the vegetations are from Xfrog.

THE LIGHTING

The lighting became a major obstacle in this piece :

- Even though the Xfrog-vegetations are great and high-quality, they may prove hard to lighten properly in Vue d'Esprit. Because of all the detail in the models, they easily get way to dark and contrasted.
I also had to make the lighting fit the sky and atmosphere. When using the standard skies of Vue, lighting and atmosphere work together easily, but when using an alphaplane for the sky, the lighting becomes a whole different situation.

To get rid of all the dark spots in the plants, I created a few "point lights". Their power was set quite low and all shadows were disabled. I then positioned them around the palmtree and plants. These lights were now lighting up the dark and shadowy areas.
I then needed some lights to highlight certain areas of the palm to make it look more realistic and beautiful, but also to simulate strong sunlight.
To do this I created two new pointlights, set their "softness" to 15 to avoid any sharp shadows. They were then moved close to the palm to highlight specific areas.

Of course the rest of the scene needed lighting also. I did the same thing here... just added a few lights where I wanted some more light and contrast.

All in all I used 12 lights in this scene.

 

FINISHING TOUCHES

The last things to do was to add the birds and soften the line between the sky and the water in postwork. I also adjusted the contrast to make the colours brighterand make it look evenmore like paradise

Enjoy! :)

 

2004 Thomas Krahn