Library 1

My first library of small plants and bushes, created or adjusted all the textures to make them look as realistic as I could

turning pfx into realistic poly plants

First 2 renders of my plants, these are paint effects that have then been converted into polygons so they can be rendered using Mental Ray, the problem is the plants use a phong for there textures so they look very flat and not very realistic

This is the same as above but has Ray Tracing turned on

 This is a few of the plants I concentrated on, in this render I have added a sun as a directional light and a ground plain in this render really shows how flat the phong is.

  In this render they now use a mia x material on the leafs and stems, this instantly looks a lot better and and has given a lot more depth to the scene.

 here I changed the camera in the Hypergraph connector to give me more settings and setting I understand more, This is before I changed the f stop so its a little darker

In this render I added a gamma correct in the Hypergraph to help with how washed out and desaturated the plants were

In these last 2 i changes how reflective and translucent the leafs were to help make it react to light in a realistic way these last 2 look a lot more realist than the ones above where i had only added a light, it took a very long time and had to get comfortable in the Hypergraph and the different ways to connect items. now i need to do the same as above but to all the plants then the same to the trees and lastly learn how to do it to grass that way i have a material library for when i start to assemble my scene and can just transfer the material onto each item.

points and description

- a full lush forest using some plants seen on Pandora
- some large tree trunks alive and dead
-a crashed samson 16 or scorpion gunship
-lots of vines and moss
-a very high level of detail
-the environment is on Pandora 10-15 years after the crash
-their is a high level of variation so it wont feel like 1 model has been duplicated to many times

Pandora foliage

after watching avatar and looking at a lot of pictures of the foliage in avatar i have discovered that during the day it just looks like a dense forest in New Zealand but at night the plants all become bio luminescent so for my scene i am thinking of creating each scene in both day and night to illustrate this difference, it is a lot more work when it comes to UV mapping which i currently know very little about  but as i get to reuse each scene it may mean less modeling as it will be showing less of the scene......possibly..

p2 inspiration

some strong images for inspiration especially image 4 giving me a lot of ideas on how to frame crashed vehicle

Project 2 Beginning main idea develpment

after watching a few of the movies i came up with 2 initial ideas
1 - the interior of a aircraft from avatar
      this had the advantage of being a military type vehicle which would give me a lot of precedents to model from and there are quite a few websites that are almost like an avatar wiki and give alot of detail on all the vehicles in the movie

http://james-camerons-avatar.wikia.com/wiki/Category:Vehicles

2 - the interior of the drop ship from district 9
was a little contrasting to the movie, I wanted to model the interior in a very pristine way that was clean and used a lot of white, i still wanted to keep the same aesthetic as so far as how the interior looks and use things like the guns from the movie to figure out this.

after compiling a lot of images as precedent i had a moment of genius where i thought of the old WW2 planes that are found crashed in dense bush many years or decades after they have crashed, With this in mind and after just watching avatar i decided to use the scene at the end where there is a big battle in the sky's  and came up with a scene where one of the Samson 16 or scorpion gunships has crashed and the plant life of Pandora has started to grow around and through the vehicle.

Samson 16

Scorpion Gunship

Final

My final animation, yay!