Trees are a bugger to make in 3D, but tremendously satisfying when you get them right.
Water's a lot easier.
If you haven't got a programme that makes good water, you just get a Photoshop airbrush with a very fuzzy edge and make some splodgy patterns like waves seen from above in black and white. You can save these as a mask and use it in your 3D programme as an alpha channel mask to create your wave pattern. Then mess about with bump mapping to get the wave heights.
This water's a very simple reflective one with a slight pinky-orange specular tint to offset the blue sky where it reflects the broken cloud I put up there.
You can make water as murky as you like. I wanted this one to be very transparent so you can see the lake bottom where the tree shades it (click on the detail below for a bigger view).I gave it quite a high refractive index though, to blur the bottom a bit and make it look a bit more realistic.
Sadly, I really enjoy doing this type of thing. I should be out chatting up girls and trying to get my life back, but yesterday afternoon I sat tweaking parameters until my 3D water made me go "Oooh".
Then I went out to a party and totally failed to chat anyone up, but more of that later …
4 comments:
the tree water scene is beautiful, Dive. I like to think of myself as a Photoshop master, which is an overstatement. But I know nothing about 3D programs. Great job!
Thanks for the compliment, Robyn.
Overstatement? I think not.
To do book covers, you need to have achieved at least the Photoshop rank of Jedi Master.
I'd like to see some of those if you ever feel like posting them.
And 3D progammes are great if you don't have enough hair-shredding frustration and shouty swearing sessions in your life.
I love the photo. At least you have something to show for your hours of antisocial behavior.
Both of you are Photoshop Jedi Mind Tricksters.
No Photoshop involved in this one, Sassy. Just lots of boring maths; joining the dots btween Cartesian co-ordinates and dicking around with textures and lighting.
It would be a lot easier to go out and photograph a tree, but I'm a sad bastard so I do this instead.
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