Adding rocks and trying out CG grass for concept forest scene.

The composition seems to be increasing in levels of realism by having me adding the geometry of the rocks around the scene, as well as the corresponding texture for all of the individual rocks. I am trying to create an arrangement in which they are slightly pointing towards the direction of the most light in the scene.

It seems to me that straight out of the Blender render engine, the rocks look the most natural out of all the natural elements I have added so far. The scale of the textures seems to be of the right size, and the geometry seems to be working in conjunction to add more visually interesting elements in the scene. I seem to be going in the right direction of creating natural elements that look convincingly real. For an added bonus, the fog in the scene is able to bring some elements closer to the camera, and send others into the far background, creating an immediate contrast that places a visual hierarchy in the scene. The light rays that cross over in the scene also add volumetric lighting, creating the impression that something is being revealed in that precise point in space. It remains to be seen what vehicle exactly I will be adding to this scene so that the composition is completed.

The next image is the layout view of the scene without textures or light sources to see firstly the arrangement of trees throughout the composition, as well as to get the impression of what my first pre-visualizations of the CG grass blades could look like as plane images. In this shot in particular, they simply look like bent rectangles that emerge from the ground level. This is because they are simply image planes that have transparency in them so only the blade of grass is the opaque portion of the image.

As I am working towards adding some foliage to the trees, this view of the layout without textures will look like the tees are made up of post-it notes instead of actual leaves.

When I have reached a certain level of satisfaction with the composition and a general level of detail with the final render, I will move onto Photoshop, like I usually do, to add the final photo-textures that are needed to break the feeling that the image is a 3d render. This to create the corresponding naturalistic feeling that I have been searching for all along from the start of the process.