First I’d like to say thanks again for the compliments since this work is all personal projects and my professional work comes nowhere close to this level due to the nature of it’s implementation as training courseware. I actually have freedom on these pieces and can learn and take them to the next level but I don’t think that they really compare with much of the commercial entertainment renderings out there. Ehh, maybe it’ll pay off one day.
I guess I should start with the lighting since on the surface it’s not that complicated. In each lighting condition I’m using two lights. I’ll only explain the sunset here to keep it simple
The sun is a Target Direct light using VRay shadows without the Area shadow option selected. It consists of a deep orange hue and I’ve set the multiplier @ 2. I’ve found higher multipliers work best with FogAtmospheric and lend themselves to more realism for natural light in general. These higher settings can then be tweaked with VRay’s Color mapping if necessary. This would be much higher for average daylight. The reason I mention this is because I’m used to using lower multipliers with the standard scanline and I’ve started cranking them up since VRay came into my life. It almost reminds me of taking a photo where there is just an enormous amount of light from the sun but you have to choke it off with the iris.
I’ve also used a second fill light (VrayLight, Plane, Invisible, Store with Irrad map) set to only produce illumination on specific included objects. In most exterior shots I realize this wouldn’t be necessary due to GI but my reasoning behind this is an attempt at producing a similar look to glossy reflections from the sky, without the render time overhead, on these objects (castle, castle cliff face, driftwood, river rocks and taller foreground shrubs. In this sunset image I’ve considered that one side of the sky is orange and the other blue so basically I’ve set the hue of this light to a blue similar to that side of the sky which is an HDRI in my Environment override. This fake glossy techniquy idea of mine needs allot of testing but you have to start somewhere.
For the Environment override I’ve used the same HDRI (tg_probe.hdr) available free on the net, modified independently for diffuse and specular. I like to use an Output map above my HDRIs for the Color Map feature but I’ve read of others using the Color Correct plug in also. For the diffuse light (GI) I just made a deeper violet version of HDRI by subtracting blue and green from it. This worked well in conjunction with the deep orange directional. The specular version of this HDRI was changed to an extreme orange. This is for the Reflection/Refraction override and is solely visible reflected in the water since nothing else in the scene is reflective. The HDRI was also rotated to match the direction of the sun/ moon for each image.
I would almost include all of the trees under lighting due to the way I’ve set them up but here is the process I took for them. They are all from images I’ve downloaded and a majority of the maps come from a tree placement script that I can’t think of the name now. I ended up using scatter instead of the script because it wouldn’t work for some reason. The scattered planes are randomized with Vertex Chaos and Scaling. For each scatter , there being eight total, I’ve also created a matching scattered, non-renderable plane, rotated 90 degree with the same material to cast a shadow. All maps were edited in Photoshop to better match the directional lighting of each scene. If the lighting’s on the opposite side I just flipped the UVs. For the materials I’ve VrayMtlWrappered them and turned off Generate and Receive GI. The Base material is a Standard material with the color map in Diffuse, Self-Illumination and Bump and an Alpha in the Opacity. To match the ambient lighting I would edit the each diffuse and Self-Illum Output settings and Color Map. I’ve used a total of about ten different maps along with miscellaneous clumps I cut out of photos and comped together in Photoshop.
Phew… This is getting long…. Must… not… stop…
The far mountains are of a chopped up cylinder (normals flipped) the photo is from the net and I edited each in MAX. For background photos I like to copy the photo into the three channels of a Gradient map and tweak each one separately. So for the sunset I set the gradient to progress horizontally and made one of the slots more orangy (The night sky is two images comped in MAX with a Mask map and gradient).
The hills and Island/ Peninsula are simply a Terrain Compound object. When I found this tool a while back I was blown away at how useful it is even though you could almost get away with using a Loft object. Then I use a combination of MeshSmooth, Noises and FFD boxes to get it positioned the way I wanted. The two background hills and the foreground bank are all copies of an original. The materials for the terrain are all pretty long and complex but in a nutshell I’ve used noises to mix the tiled maps and vertex color to blend between dirt and grass. Everything has a falloff in the Diffuse in some form or another to give either a soft dusty look or a hint of lighting.
Hope I answered all the questions posted.
--Jon
As an overall note: In most cases the materials were left the same for each lighting condition but anything like the trees had to be modified with the color map of the output settings.
) than necessary but maybe we can figure out how to simplify along the way.