A showreel showcasing an environment I designed, modelled, texture painted, and composited.
Programs Used:
Blender
Substance Painter
Photoshop
Adobe Premier Pro
Nature Assets:
Bushes:
– https://blendermarket.com/products/the-grass-essentials
Grass Particles:
– https://blendermarket.com/products/the-grass-essentials
– https://www.3d-wolf.com/products/grass.html
A meeting with my tutor Jon introduced me to the post-processing capabilities available within Blender that do not affect the rendering times of my final output. Using the compositing nodes, I added some effects that helped to enhance my image.
Lens Distortion allowed me to create the illusion that the camera inside blender was a real camera. Even though I only used this slightly, the effect it gives adds a rather mystical theme to my overall image, something I believe improves it.
Adding a glare allowed me to accentuate objects in this scene, as well as exaggerate the time of day I lit this image as – sundown. The glow this node added resembled the glow a low sun emits, creating realism within this scene.
I wanted to add some noise texture to this scene, but could not gain the correct effect I had hoped for. Because of this, I chose to stick to just these two nodes for all of my final stills.
These were my results:
When discussing final changed to my tutor, he mentioned it would be a good idea to add some volumetrics to my scene in order to add to the realism. To do so, I followed a suggested tutorial on how to apply effects to my final image.
In this tutorial, Glen Alexandrov explains multiple ways in which I can add volumetrics to my scene to add depth. From this tutorial, I managed to incorporate volume scatter material, variable density, volume absorption, and even add a light pattern to my lamp. This helped my scene by making it look less virtual and more realistic.
As I began to get closer to the end of this project, I dedicated some time to finding out more about the rendering settings I had on my work. I was rather new to this subject, so, again, I consulted the Blender community, and followed the advice they had to give.
Blender Guru uploaded an advice video on exactly this, so I chose to take notes and see what I could apply to my work. Not all of these helped to reduce the rendering times, but they did help to improve my final outcome.
1. Reducing Light bounces
I reduced my light bounces to have a maximum of 2.
2. Tile size
I ensured my Auto Tile Add-on was checked so I could optimise the rendering time.
3. Reducing samples
When creating test renders, I reduced the sampling sizes to save time, turning them back up to at least 128 when creating final images.
4. Denoising
Denoising helped to reduce some noise in my image, helping to make my scene look more realistic.
5. Clamp it
To reduce the number of white ‘fireflies’, I ensured I had clamped indirectly.
6. Object Instancing
When appending the same item multiple times, instead of duplicating them, I Instanced them, helping to reduce memory.
After following this tutorial I consulted my tutor, who also gave me advice on how to optimise my rendering times. I also applied some of my own ideas to the final product, reducing the number of faces but removing unnecessary foliage, and changing the colour of the light to add a mystical feel to the scene.
Alterations:
When exporting my final image, I found that there was a shadow around the smoke domain I could not get rid of. My first instinct was to enlarge the size of the domain to fit the scene, however, this led the fire to increase in size as well, despite me conducting this alteration in edit mode. After spending hours trying to solve this problem, I consulted a friend on my course, who suggested I may have the shadow box ticked on this item. This ended up being true, and once I had unchecked that option, my final rendering looked as I had hoped, and the shading had disappeared.