Stuff I wish I knew

BorisBadenov

So I've been around for quite a while but never been very active. I would like to get involved more but there's always something I don't know that's keeping me from progressing.

For example I just bought Asbru Crossing in a recent sale.  The promo images look great, but the set doesn't include any of the cool running water rapids or waterfalls or background landscape.  I have no idea where to even begin to make something that looks halfway decent.  My attempt looks pretty lame.

How were those promo images made?

 

Roman_K2

Many ways to approach this: it *could* be a single photo used as a background image - there are ways of composing photographs in a sort of 1:3 portrait format, for placing onto an L-shaped background model. You could also take something like a morphing terrain and render it as blue-ish, glossy plastic and have that be the "water". Or you could create a flat plane primitive with a hundred or more divisions and then "deform it" to be the bumpy, undulating surface for the water which again could be rendered glossy and/or glassy. (There is a tutorial on Youtube about the deformer tool in DAZ Studio; a simple morphing plane is included in "Everyday Morphing Primitives" in the DAZ store.) And there could be morphing 3-D rocks under the semi-transparent water plane... or not.

And you could always use a model of a forest with a river or creek but that would load up the system quick... I'm a believer in rendering backgrounds separately; a background can easily be a 3-D scene created with polygon models, and then you put the "flat" background image onto a 3-D background prop.

There is a bit of "sleight of hand" involved in achieving good water effects; look at Ansel Adam's famous silver-based photo of the Serpent River where parts of the "real" river appear fairly wet while other parts (like where the water is churning and muddy perhaps) look like a cheap plastic model.  I like looking at Frederic Church's famous oil painting of Niagara Falls, from the days before acrylics.

P.S. Some really neat water effects here, some of the best I've seen. http://www.daz3d.com/fountain-collection-for-iray

Ok so it's not foaming, rushing water but still....