Jungle Environment
This piece was a team effort, the fountain and ruins were designed and constructed by me. The final composition was also created by me. The layout and compositing were done in a way to create an eerie and claustrophobic mood, as the forest was reclaiming this area.
The composite involved multiple layers to create the early dawn lighting. Fog and mist where layered throughout to create the misty early morning fog effect after a heavy rain.
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Software:
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Adobe Photoshop
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Autodesk 3DS Max
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Pixologic ZBrush
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Substance Designer
Production
Once a concept was established, production of this piece began with blocking and then modeling the fountain and ruins. The fountain was constructed first in 3DS Max, since the fountains top tiers in the concept had fallen over, the model was brought into ZBrush and given a weathered appearance.
Fountain Reference
Texturing
This piece was a team effort, the fountain and ruins were designed and constructed by me. The final composition was also created by me. The layout and compositing were done in a way to create an eerie and claustrophobic mood, as the forest was reclaiming this area.
The texture on the fountain was designed in Substance Designer. On the right is the full graph, below are the resulting nodes. The nodes were then brought into 3DS Max, and plugged into an arch and design shader and adjusted to fit the scene.
Diffuse Map
Ambient Map
Height Map
Normal Map
Roughness Map
Metallic Map
Post-production
Layer 1: The post-production process began, with rendering out the scene
with only the skylight active. To save on render time, the first set of renders,
were done without cast shadows
on the plants.
Layer 2: Next a render with only the sunlight lighting the scene, was used to lighten the base scene. The background image was also added at this point.
Layer 7: At this point after merging together the sun and sky light layers, an auto color, auto contrast, and auto tone, where applied to the image to combine the color tones from the two renders to better match their true tones.
Layer 11: After that a third render with added lights to break up the shadows visible from inside the buildings. Then after applying an overlay of the previous layer consisting of the sun and sky lights, the contrast, hue, and saturation were manually adjusted.
Layer 18: The plants in the scene where all rendered out a final time, with cast shadows active on those. That render was then used as an alpha layer and placed above the existing layers in the composite. To add more emphasis on the shadows on the rest of the scene, as well as the plants, two ambient occlusion passes were multiplied on top of the light layers.
Layer 21: To achieve the feeling of everything being overrun by nature, I added a layer of hanging vines in the foreground, layered several of those to match the scenes lighting direction.
Layer 25: To create a sense of time, alpha layers of mist and fog were added to the foreground, midground and background. This achieved that early morning effect.
Layer 29: The final image was completed, by adding a few more plant elements to the foreground to add more depth. A final mist alpha was added to brighten the other mist layers, to make those more prominent. Final adjustments were made to the brightness and contrast in the scene. Then a vignette was added to finish the piece off.