Cornucopia3D "Making of"

Making of "Crimson and Clover" by Donald Quinn

This is a short illustration of how I put together the my scene, "Crimson and Clover".

I began this image with the woodland mushrooms in Poser. I added a few variations and saved the .pz3 scene.
 

In Vue, I imported the mushroom-laden scene file and adjusted the materials (mostly dulling the highlights) and saved each mushroom object as a Vue object. From there, I created a simple Plane and made an ecosystem material with a couple layers. The first layer contains the grass clump objects and the other layer contains the mushroom objects as well as the fantastic white clover plant from Incredibly Lush Underbrush. I set the density of the mushrooms and clovers to "avoid overlapping instances" and populated this layer first (and several times until I got an arrangement that was pleasing!). I then populated the dense grass layer, set to "decay near foreign objects" with a high influence.
 

Now I wanted a camera and lens setting which would be similar to what would work best if this was a real patch of mushrooms I needed to shoot for, say, a 5th grade health class book. One would not use a 50mm lens for this, so I went to (roughly) a 20mm with a -25% lens aberration. Basically a nice little barrel lens.
 

 

Preparing to render, I switched my atmosphere lighting to radiosity, the sun softness to 2 degrees and boosted the soft shadow quality of the sun to +2.
 

My render settings are custom "User settings", and evolved from rendering animations which did not flicker or have "chattering" in the anti-aliasing of ecosystems. Even though I do mostly stills for the galleries, I always set up as though it's going to be animated. A habit from working twelve years in high-stress post-production trenches- never lock yourself down and always be prepared for a client to barge through the door and ask for a camera move from "The Matrix"!
 

Once rendered, I saved the RGB and Z-depth images and brought them into Photoshop.
 

First I do an "Auto-Levels" on the Z-depth image, so there is full black and white points. This will give you more control over the DOF. Often I also add a slight gaussian blur to the Z-depth just to soften up the edges just a tad, since they are not anti-aliased. In the RGB image I create a "New Channel" and copy/paste the Z-depth image into the new channel. The Z-depth image is now the alpha channel of the RGB image. Now select the RGB channel at the top and toggle off the visibility of the Alpha channel.
 

For the DOF, I go to Filter--->Blur---->Lens Blur. As long as the Depth Map source is set to "Alpha 1" you can fiddle with the Blur Focal Distance and other settings to get the desired DOF. I also like to add a tiny bit of noise here. I use the exact same process and filter in After Effects for animations as well. DOF is wildly "expensive" to do with the renderer (not just in Vue) and should always be done as a post-process effect.
 

Lastly, I run the image through Tiffen DFX for Photoshop and apply FL-B/D, which is a color conversion filter used with daylight-corrected media. The same effect (along with the DOF post-process) can be done in numerous free image editing programs if you don't have access to Photoshop.

 

 

Thanks! Donald Quinn