Chapter 7: Faking Camera Effects for Better Renders

Now that we've created the basic building blocks for a nature scene, we can start to get a little deeper into making a good nature scene. What we have so far has all the elements we might want to have in a landscape: grass, rocks, water, sky. But it doesn't really look all that interesting or exciting. If we showed this to a director right now, they'd laugh and tell us to do better. So, let's take our scene up a notch. As a developing artist, it can be difficult to really hone in on this hard-to-pinpoint idea of what will make the scene better. With time and experience, you'll have more of an idea of what exactly you want to do to make a scene better. But for now, let's look back at the original premise of our idea. We wanted to make a realistic environment. So, let's spend this chapter and the next one looking at adding the smaller details that will make this environment look realistic. In this...