Mountains, trees, thick mist. Classical elements... I was going for the feel of a traditional Oriental landscape, although this is a horizontal layout. I think it'll be particularly effective when it's printed on white paper, as I set the viewpoint so you can't really see the edges of the image (just fade into white fog). The landscape is simple looking, but tough to put together effectively, as I explain in the tech notes below. I made another related image later that has a vertical composition, Snowy Mountaintops.
Tech notes: For you CG people out there, this image was rather difficult to put together. For one thing, the trees aren't actual objects... just pictures of trees. This means I couldn't simply land them on the terrain, I had to place them manually. I think I could have done a substitution sort of thing, land 'marker' objects and then replace with trees... but I didn't think of that till I was almost done. Whoops.
Beyond that, there's the mist. I wanted it to be thicker around the base of the mountains, to the point of opacity. I played with the Fog controls plenty, but found that my farther/higher mountains were too obscured for the effect I wanted... and, you could still see the bottom of the mountains where they ended. Adding a similarly-colored ground plane didn't help. So, I tilted all the mountains back by about 45 degrees, made the ground plane white, moved the camera to look down at them, and then cranked up the fog. As a result, you can see the farther mountaintop almost as well as the foreground, but they all fade away to whiteness in the valley. Whew.
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jen@pixelscapes.com
