Autumn Pool

Inspired by the colours starting to appear on the trees, I created an autumn (fall) scene with a forest pool.

There are a huge number of vertices in this scene,  it really pushed the limits of what my workstation is capable of.

Edit: 1st October.  There were some problems with the lighting that I was not happy with.  In the original, the light and dark on the tree trunks and branches did not match up with the direction of the sunlight.  I have been travelling and not able to get back to my PC to update.  At last, an updated version,  the original is below for comparison.  Click the images for a larger version.

Autumn Pool

Before final adjustment to light levels and adding 2x bounce lighting

   
And the original version....

Issues with sky-lighting on the branches and trunk

Latest Project - Female character

A work-in-progress shot of a female character I have been modelling.  This is part of a follow-along course from Blender.org,  produced by Angela Guenette.

A bit different from the Nature Academy material I have been posting so far.

This is not yet complete.  Most of the modelling is done, I have only created place-holder textures and I plan to rig her for animation.

A couple of additional shots:

Mountain Loch - Revisited

I was quite please with my Mountain Loch image, and posted it to BlenderArtists.org. I got some really good comments back about the scaling of the trees v's the mountain and did some updates.  I also received some suggestion to try different focal lengths on the camera settings.

I am not a photographer and pretty clueless about the camera settings.  After a bit or research, I find that lower focal lengths give a wide angle, while longer focal lengths give zoom.  After a bit of experimentation, I have two new versions of the mountain scene.

Mountain Loch v2 - 90mm focal length "zoom"

V2 differs from the previous post in that I added lots more trees (about 500 for the scene) in an attempt to sell the scale of the (small) mountain.  The scene reminds me of the small islands on the west coast of Scotland more than some monster mountain.  It was never intended to be the Matterhorn :)

Mountain Loch v3 - 23mm focal length "wide angle"

The wide angle shot in V3 is very unforgiving on poor foreground detail,  I added some grass coming through the snow,  without this, your eye has nothing to settle on in the foreground and it is too easy to pick fault with the close-up parts.

Toadstools in the Forest

The Week 9 theme for The Nature Academy is a misty forest scene.  I deviated from the tutorial quite a bit to get the look I was after, I used my own backdrop and made my first seamless texture for the ground.  The toadstool idea came from a family walk a couple of weekends ago, the reference photo is below.

Edit:  A slight tweak to the foreground plants. Original is below.

Toadstools in the Forest

Original - tweaked the foreground foliage

Here is the reference pic for the toadstools:

For my fellow students at The Nature Academy,  here is the backdrop image and ground texture.

Modelling and layout

Let me know what you think?