Since I mentioned Sophia’s hideout yesterday, I though I’d describe how that went last night. Basically, I put together a few walls in Poser using the Fantasy Castle kit (from Daz3d) and took a render using a long distant shot. Then, in Bryce, I put together a couple of mountain peeks using the same texture that I used for my previous renders for the Palatine Mountains. However, I realized that I needed to add another peak, but with the top flattened, so I could have a place to actually set the hideout in the scene. After doing that, I took a render in Bryce and loaded it into Photoshop. Once in PS, I opened up the Poser render and copy-pasted the castle walls into the Bryce image.
At this point, there really wasn’t any depth between the castle hideout and the mountains. In other words, the castle looked too “superimposed” onto the scene. To fix that, I copied a new layer of the mountain scene and put it on top of the castle. After making the top layer transparent enough that I could see the castle on the layer below, I erased a hole around much of the castle, leaving some of the icy crags on the bottom section --- making it look like they were in front of the castle. In other words, when I was done, it looked like the hideout was sitting back a little ways from the cliff side, with some rocks and snow in front of the walls. Instead of the castle looking like it was floating on top of the background, this technique made it appear more a part of the whole scene.
Anyway, just a little trick I’ve discovered during the last year of doing this stuff. I’m pretty much all self-taught through trial and error, but I’m happy how this shot came out. See? I’m not always negative! ;-)
Sounds like you're rendering in Poser or DAZ Studio - with their lack of atmospherics, depth is always elusive. You might want to try this : put the background in a layer of its own, put a "haze/fog" layer on top of it, and color-fill this with bluish/white (or whatever haze color seems relevant), and make this layer ALMOST transparent - let just enough to get the desired "push" into the distance. You can also put an even more transparent layer in front of your midground, to make the foreground "move forward", if that improves the depth. Of course, you can also airbrush the haze layers (and/or selectively and softly erase part of it) for a more natural look, but that's WORK, which I prefer to avoid in favor of getting more storytelling done ;o) Being a faithful reader of "Chronicles", I hope you will make the same choice ;o) Either way, keep it up, it's an impressive achievement!
ReplyDeleteThank you! I'll try playing around with your suggestion in Photoshop.
ReplyDeleteThanks again for your idea, and thanks for being a loyal reader! :-)