Part 14 Environment and Plants

1. Tackling the environment.

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3. The ivy in final render has 80 tris and is without a normal map just the texture map.

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5. From now on I will be only testing at 20% resolution because this render test took 9.38 minutes. Calculating the light shadow of the alphas and the normal map shadowing is time consuming. In conclusion I am not  having any normal maps on my foliage. Without the normal map it did it in 5 minutes and was fully rendered, it's a shame that Maya takes a long time to calculate were the alpha shadows textures will be.

6. I need to be careful with my lighting. I will also have to set up a lot more then one set of lights because the directional lights do interfere with the other lighting.

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8. Terrible lighting because I softened the shadow too much.

9. Decided to go with adding two more lights into the scene. red and green and also increased the blue directional lights. This gives it a sharp shadow yet its opacity is a little more soft. The coloured lights influence the shadow which gives it more variety. (Of course I am never happy with lighting I will change it again later on…)

10. I need to be careful with camera positions because rendering an object in the soft shadow may well make it look too dull. So knowing where the light is coming from helps me to position the camera will get better results.

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Back to texturing more plants.

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13. Cutting and transform warping. (I didn’t do too much of it because the picture quality will decrease).

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15. Time to moss things up and I may add poly moss.

16. I put the moss texture on everything outside. I really need to start putting in more junk items and mostly importantly the floor foliage. I will also have to tweak some of the ivy so it doesn’t give off an out of place dark shadow. (Bottom render is at 50% of 1024, haven’t turned up the shadow options and it is not in HD)

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20. A render at 25% for my third long leaf wall plant.

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