Scene two is finally here!!

Making the scene was pretty straight forward once the trees had been made, the only other objects to be created was the fence, and the land that one can see in the background. The textures I had got from the web in the form of pictures were converted in Photoshop and used in max. I even went walking in the parks where I live to photo trees, leaves, tarmac and wooden fence posts for ideas, some were used too.

Creating the hills, to start with I chose patch grids from the Create>Geometry. Drop down list and in the top viewport dragged a quad patch to a certain specification like the picture below. A Quad Patch grid is a flat plane that can be modified into 3D surface. Quad Patch refers to patch grid with four vertices.

Making sure Quad Patch is still selected I Right click and chose Convert To>Convert To Editable Patch. Then I went to the modify tab, activated Vertex selection. Then, I moved the vertices up and down to create a slope.

Next came the fence, the fence was very simple too, just made by creating two rectangles of different lengths then cloning them and adding them in a fence like manner, then it was just a job of moving them about and keep cloning them until a very long fence was made. Then I cloned the whole length and put the cloned one parallel.

As for the trees, the tutorial in week 5 explains how I made them; it was then just about time to set the scene up. I had cloned the trees and rotated them to give the illusion that the trees were different. Once the scene was in place I had to create the lighting, this was the most time consuming. I had wanted to add a fog effect to give that September morning feel to the picture but I kept getting a problem with the way light passed through my leaves, because they were not a “real” 3D object and just a texture on an invisible box the volumetric light (in the fog I presume) kept showing the leafs in their true form (not invisible) like the render shown below.

To overcome this problem I dismissed the fog effect and rendered the scene with mental ray and my lighting in the scene was of the same caliber; this made my scene very colorful and added some good quality shadows.