Drones over our heads!
This morning we came across a Twitter post from Elon Musk “Drone war I”. Referencing a news article from the Independent news - U.K.
We try to ignore all the news coming from the war in Ukraine but the reality is that even though we try to ignore it and look on bright side of life it finds a way into our subconscious mind.
We decided to use this opportunity to test out Corona render 9’s new sky. This new version of the skylight environment material includes contrails which look amazing. After testing them out and playing with the new cloud features we realized that this is a great tool to simulate airplanes (or drones in this case), flying over our heads.
After seeing the tweet we decide to get to work ASAP because we needed to post this in the afternoon the same day.
So we opened 3d Studio max and started creating the vegetation. We used our favorite tool, Forest pack. Our workflow consisted of basically creating 3 types of grass fields. The wheat fields that take up most of the scene in the mid ground. Then we added a flower patch to highlight the resilience of the Ukrainian people and their beautiful countryside. Finally we added some crazy grasses in the foreground to give it a bit more personality.
The image was starting to take of but it still needed some more work. We did want to keep it simple so that we focus the viewer’s attention to the sky.
Although this image does look interesting it still needs more work.
Some trees in the background were necessary to mark a clear horizon and give a sense of location to the viewer.
So we proceeded to go ahead and add some background trees.
Actually we only added 1 type of tree. We always opt to use Maxtree’s vegetation library as we believe they provide the best option for realistic vegetation and integration with Forest pack as well as GrowFx.
With forest pack gave it a random size as well as rotation. This helped a lot and made it look as if there were many different trees in the background.
We used circle splines to add trees only to the areas that we wanted and voila!
We have a Horizon.
Lastly we decided to add a small cottage house. The idea was to give it an abandoned look, so we added a dying tree next to it. Giving the illusion that this home must have been abandoned after the war broke out.
Again, this project had to be completed really fast so we had to work with what we could get at that moment. Overall this project took about 4 hours of work and 2 hours to render. So this was completed in 6 hours total.
For this project we used Corona 9 render engine, Forest pack 7 and 3Dsmax.
Hope you guys like our explanation of the process and we look forward to bringing more step by step process of our work.