The Zen Garden

Something I've been working on for a few weeks.. Using maya, paint fx, Onyx, photoshop and mental ray.. For some reason I feel its not quite there.. Any suggestion on improving it, making it better are much appreciated.

Made some improvements to the house, and some more props and vegetation:

update, removed the acer trees, added rocks to the garden..

It seems to be lacking mood. You need some better light, maybe a sunrise. Add some fog maybe, and you need some more believable camera artifacts. Its too clean and perfect right now. Some gamma correction and depth of field would be a start. Just minor tweaks. Start with some of the depth of field and camera settings and go from there.

Hey thanks for the feedback, I will add those elements..

it think the house or whtever is being distracted by the tress. try to open the view and put the the tress far so the building is more visible. other than that love the modeling and colours. keep it up

i agree with the above replies..

one thing with paint effects is that is that they are quite easy to recognize.. and i can see with your image it has that paint effects kind of look. Lighting could help quite a lot, but maybe trying to customize the paint effects as much as possible to make them less recognizable. right now i can look at your image and figure out which ones you used right away ;p

Another big one this scene seems to be missing is distance fog. Even a slight gradient will really enhance realism! Output a cameraDepth pass (z-depth) and you can use this to drive a slight fog in Photoshop or Nuke (or whatever you use), and this will greatly enhance the mood and atmosphere of your scene!

By the way, it's a gorgeous scene. I love it!

@InfernalDarkness: Thanks man!, I've been using your advice in the Forests in mental ray thread to work on this, which has been a big help.. I've added in the fog, as you and another poster have suggested..

@Murtaza: Thanks man.. I wanted the Pagoda to be occluded by the trees.. Part of the composition idea.. Thx for the feedback..

@ffk: Thanks for the feedback man.. Yeah I hear you, I'd used Pfx for the cherry blossoms, which I've tweaked.. Birch blowing.. ;p

Its looking a lot better.

This thread has been automatically closed as it remained inactive for 12 months. If you wish to continue the discussion, please create a new thread in the appropriate forum.