Shot of the tree.

Seeing as no files have been sent to me, I have had to create a new shot with the files that I had.

I have a lit tree (with no swing), an environment and that is about it.

I have added the environment to the tree scene and had to light both. I have made the lighting on the environment blue and purple from the concept art that I was shown several weeks ago. The sky is supposed to be an ocean but I could not get it to work and when I tried to get it to work, it took forty minutes to render one frame. To get around this, I added a standard plane with a ramp texture. I also had to take the displacement maps off the tree and environment and just leave the bump map. To be honest, I can't see much different when I took the displacement map off so I will just leave them off.

I had to use the tracking again to set up the cameras correctly. After I did this the camera looked correct but the tree was too static. To get around this, I had to animate the tree to get the scene to look correct. When I did this the environment then looked wrong so I parented the environment to the tree so it would animate with the tree. When looking through the camera, it finally looked how I wanted it to.

It took me quite a long time to get the cameras in the correct place and making the scene look how it should. I also had to keep adjusting the light to make sure it was correct all of the time.

Here is how the scene looks:

This is a shot of the scene so that you can see the tree, lighting and where the camera is set up.

 This is an overall shot. It has the whole environment and lighting plus the tree very small in the centre so you can see how small it is compared to the environment.

The shot below shows the camera half way through the animation and shows the scene and composition. You can see the textures but it looks very geometric and unsmoothed. You also cannot see any of the lighting but can see the way it is going to look. 

The shot below is a rendered frame. It is at the beginning of the animation and you can see the purple and blue lighting on the mountains. You can also see the red on the floor and how the lighting is reflected onto the tree. There is also the textures applied (bump and colour map) which gives the tree a much more realistic look. With all the textures and lighting on here, it took about 4 and a half minutes to render this one frame. Thats without the displacement maps. Deon has to add the swing because the file was not sent so could not add it but it shouldn't be much of an issue to import it in.

I also added some depth of field to the camera. This made the tree more focused and the background slightly out of focus - like a real camera would. This makes it more realistic and adds a sense of depth to the 3D scene.

I have to send the file to Deon to be rendered on his super fast pc as it will take about a year to render on my dual core mac. 

Away it goes...