The
Desert Scene: I start out with the environment, generating the sky and ground.
Utilizing Mental Ray material shader "environmental horizon day",
I can easily create a great looking sky. It was done by creating a huge sphere
and mapping the shader inside the object. A little tweaking of the shader
was done by changing the color of the sky and added turbulence to the clouds.
Mirrored the sky on the sphere and it looked good enough at this point. Next
to the ground.
Created
a grid and placed a texture map to it. A 3D fractal noise was add to dirty up
the texture map. And did some bumping to add some volume to the ground.
Previewing
the sky and ground together.
In
order to view
this site
correctly.
You need the
latest Flash
player.
To
add more realism to the scene. A layered fog was add to the scene. In real life
the horizon looks blurry and the reason for this is that we look through an
atmosphere. The layered fog did this effect quite well. So I tweaked the settings
till it looked right.
At
this point I wanted to test out the shadows. So I created a sphere just for
that. This will be replaced with another object in the final render. OK, so
far so good. Next I'm going to add some dynamics to the scene, a big o'dust
cloud under sphere.