This is a walkthrough of the WATERFALL scene created using Vue 6 Infinite.


Concept
The Waterfall scene was inspired by the images from BBC's documentary "Planet Earth". I took several screencaptures from the DVD for reference. The goal was to create a similar image, not replicate it.

I did some quick pencil sketches (so quick and crappy that I won't even post them here) to solidify the idea. It often helps to have such sketches to refer back to. They don't need to be accurate, just clear enough to help you compose your scene just like the idea in your head.

The basic composition would be in 3 layers: a distant background layer, the main middle layer where the waterfall would go, and the immediate foreground layer right near the camera.

The foreground and background layers are really important. They may not be the main focus of the scene, but they provide the realism and sense of scale for the middle layer. We'll see exactly how in a few moments.

I had decided to use the Panavasion frame size (47:20). Always decide on the frame size before making the scene if possible. This will help you when creating the proper composition.

Time was tight, so it became important to achieve realism without wasting time.

The Terrain
The most integral part of any Vue scene - the terrain. Or terrains in this case. I created a quick lofty mountain in a 512x512 Standard Terrain. This would be the background layer.


The Background Mountain

The second terrain was a procedural terrain. It started out as a basic 512x512 terrain. I created a basic "C" shape manually, then used the CANYON terrain modifier. I converted it to Procedural and added the Sedimentary Rock function that ships with Vue for added detail. The procedural terrain takes a bit more time to render but the results are great!

The front of the C shape's left hook became the "foreground layer" and saved me from making a third terrain!


The Main Terrain



The Atmosphere
This is where most of the realism of any scene is decided. Now that I had the basic scene set up, I needed to create the lighting and mood of the theme. I highly recommend figuring out the atmosphere before adding too much detail as they may need to be changed if the atmosphere changes.

I experimented with several "blue sky" atmospheres but it didn't look real enough. The image was supposedly in a tropical area, so the afternoon sky should be heavily bright.

The Atmosphere Settings:


You can see these screenshots above for all the settings from the Atmosphere. Here are the main ones:

Light Balance = 80%: Most of the light would come from the sun rather than ambient light. The shadows would look stronger, as would be the case in the tropics.

Volumetric Sunlight: This would make the atmopshere "heavy".

Aerial Perspective = 40: While I was setting the haze properties, I realized the mountains I had created were only several meters long. The new Spectral atmospheric model in Vue 6 calculates dust particles, etc. in the air to create realism and the small terrains didn't achieve much realism at all. Thankfully, the Spectral atmospheres come with a setting called Aerial Perspective which let's you decide the overall "size" of the universe. I boosted this setting from the standard 10 to 40 which adapted the atmosphere to my small models - making several meters look like several kilometers. Now the background layer was covered by white haze. I also softened the sunlight by 5 degrees resulting in blurred shadows which added even more realism. You wouldn't be able to see real shadows that clearly at such a scale!

I highly recommend using soft shadows in ANY scene. Hard shadows always look non-realistic. Usually the shadows are what give away that an image is CG. In indoor or closeup scenes you can use 10º to 20º depending on the requirements.

Materials and EcoSystems
With everything else done, it would be the materials that would make or break this scene. Getting the perfect stone texture was the hardest part. Green vegetation areas were made from modified "Material Layer" materials that ship with Vue. They wouldn't matter much as my trees would take over that area, so I didn't spend much time with it. For the stone I experimented with bitmaps first. But the detailing was not right. And creating unique textures for this large a mountain would take too much time. So I opted for procedural materials. I used a sedimentary rock pattern as the base and mixed it with a blocky bumpy material that would create the jutting block slabs in the mountain face. The function is available as "Complex Sedimentary Rock" in the Fractrals category of the Vue Functions Browser.

I would go on tweaking the material as the scene progressed, but overall it remained the same.

The one of the two most important aspects of the image would be the vegetation. Unlike other 3D packages, Vue would allow me to quickly set up the entire jungle with its EcoSystem II technology. I imagined that by the time I was finished, I would have several billion polygons from the hundred thousand or more trees in the scene. And I had to work without a renderfarm so I decided to lower the polygon budget.

I took a standard SolidGrowth tree (Summer Cherry Tree) that ships with Vue 6 and edited it by expanding it's coverage and removing the trunk. At the viewing angle and scale, tree trunks or branches would not be visible at all and save lots of polygons as well. Similarly, only the biggest trees would be visible and with enough color and size variations in the EcoSystem, I got away with having only one tree species in the whole scene.


Edited settings for custom Summer Cherry Tree

If you look at the terrain screenshots from before, you will notice I used the canyon modifier that creates "terraces" - this was very intentional. The terraces would present good locations for trees to be populated. I biased the EcoSystem to have trees on flat surfaces rather than slopes.


EcoSystem Influence Settings

The material was applied to both terrains. And with over 110,000 tres, I was suddenly facing over 8.3 billion polygons. That can kill your render times!!

Here's my secret: Populate the terrains to your heart's content. When it looks good, use the EcoSystem Painting tools (Vue 6 only) and erase trees that are NOT in the visible area. Use the Camera view cone (see screenshot below) as a guide. So after erasing non-required trees, I ended up with 7,643,940,595 polygons. 45,845 trees on the main terrain and 1903 trees on the background terrain. That's a BIG difference.


Erasing unwanted trees to save memory and render times

The Hardest Part: The Waterfalls
You can't have a waterfall scene without a waterfall, IMHO. And creating a realistic waterfall is a HUGE pain!

I started experimenting with MetaParticles in 3D Studio MAX (this is how those readymade waterfall objects sold on some online communities are made). Theoretically, I needed over several trillion particles to make it look REAL! Realistically, I needed a few million. But both choices were out as I didn't have enough time to make it look real.

I experimented with some basic objects and applied volumetric materials to it. No go. They didn't look good AT ALL!

Using lots of reference photos from the web, I created the left waterfall first in Corel PhotoPaint X3 in grayscale and exported it as a transparent PNG. I applied the PNG to an Alpha Plane in Vue. After that it was all about size and positioning. When seen from any non-Camera views, it is apparent that the position and shape of the waterfall does not match the illusion the rendered image creates. It, of course, does not matter since this was a still image and the illusion was more than enough.


The Painted Waterfalls


The Painted Waterfall on an Alpha Plane


Waterfall Alpha Plane Placement

The Alpha Plane material's luminous and diffusive properties were boosted to simulate the proper color of the falling water. The material's glow property was also utilized to achieve the sense of water being sprayed everywhere.

While the first waterfall was straightforward - in shape and in setting up, the second one was not. I wanted to go for a different shape for the second waterfall, as a second straight falling waterfall would look unrealistic and boring. I also wanted to keep the first one as the main waterfall. While single waterfalls are common enough, most of the time there are multiple falls.

Experimenting with different methods of simulating water had taken too much time, so this time I painted the second waterfall directly on a low resolution render of the scene. The second waterfall started as a thinner line of water falling midway of the image and then disappearing in some unshown rivulet or merging with an unshown pool of water. But it kept looking incomplete, so I created a more light, wide and more chaotic waterfall starting a bit after the second waterfall ended. It would look as if the small waterfall gathered in an unshown pool on a terrace in the mountain and then overflowed over the edge.

Since the new waterfall was painted over the rendered image, placing it in the 3D scene became a bit easier. One thing I had done was use a low resolution when painting the waterfalls (well under 400px high). Detail is easier to add in a smaller image, and since the waterfall was "looked upon" from a distance, Vue's bicubic interpolation and resampling (stretching) would make the image automatically blur - giving even more realism as expected from such a high waterfall.

The two waterfalls were in place but it still felt like something was missing. After a while I figured out there was no mist or fog created by the water. To simulate that, I created 4 stretched spheres with volumetric fog materials. Three were placed at the bottom of the falls where the unshown pool was supposed to be, and one where the second waterfall broke midway. The shape of the volumetric material was kept very vague as no detail would really be visible at that distance.


The Scene in Vue + The Materials Used

All done!
So now all I had to do was wait while the render finished. I used Global Radiosity so it took a bit of time. Overall the image (1280x545 @ Final) took about 7 hours to render on a Pentium 4 HT w/ 2GB RAM (VueMark Score: 157).

The render was done and I was still not happy with. After some thought, I converted the image to black and white using the Post Processing dialog. It looked much more realistic then!

FINAL RENDER:


Various Stages:


I hope this walkthrough helps you with your Vue projects!

To see more of my Vue work, head on over to =nukeation





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