Any tips for making natural scenes?

[jlelievre]

Hey Jusas-

making a scene look natural takes a lot of time and a lot of practice. A good approach to making a natural scene is to figure out exactly what you want. I find doing preliminary sketches helps out a lot; I often use photo references as well for any scene I do.

The biggest piece of advice I ever got was from one of my 3d artists Willi Hammes ( http://www.willihammes.com). He said just look at the things around you; study the texture, lighting and composition of things. Then take these ideas and apply them to your scene.

You may also want to figure out what you need to model in 3d, and what you can get away with in 2d. If for example your doing a scene where you have a tree in the foreground, and then a field behind it, you could model the tree and some of the grass, and then possibly use a 2d image of grass for the background. For a sky you can most likely get away with using a 2d image.

These are just some of the basic steps I use when creating a natural scene. I'm sure everyone has their own approach. I hope this helps a little bit. :)

[Aldaryn]

Just a simple suggestion, when dealing with trees:

Blend the trunk model into the ground seamlessly, eliminating the hard edge will add some realism, and this is a part of "CG nature", where it usually fails: The trees tutching the ground: a hard seam... (even with good textures, the shading vill be cut)
Of course this makes material management a bit diffuicult, but seeing some recent high end images prove the method. :)

And another thing: Put various little things everywhere, and some taller grass into cracks, safer holes, and beside those hard edges. (Almost beside every sheer edge...)

And of course: Examine the real nature carefully, take as many reference photos as you can, or even more... ;)
Remember: the first building block of your fantasy has to be reality, for your fantasy to be realistic. :D

Cheers!

- A.

(P.S.: Egdges mentioned above are edges found in the geometry, not meant as a sub object of e.g. a poly object)

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