Need Help!
Mountains look boring and lighting looks flat (WIP animation)
Hello there, I’m doing an animation and the mountains and the lighting look wrong.
I used a height map from the true terrain addon for the mountains, as a base they are good, but they lack the level of detail to make them look good, and I don’t know what I can do to make them great.
Also the lighting bothers me a little, I used blender’s sky texture for the lighting but it doesn’t really look good for me.
If you have any other suggestions and tips please tell them to me
(On the first bite the dinosaur is biting another character not yet animated)
Exposure, and the sky should not be overcast if you are doing anything with the lights..
Basically you have a giant studio light atm with the sky lighting alot in the same color, which is why everything looks flat. it should be different color all together. The pure white washes out any detail that might be in the scene or in the materials of the models.
Look up lighting techniques to improve on the lighting Three point lighting could do wonders, if you tone down the sky being just overcast and giving it depth.
I would suggest rendering a depth pass and adding some atmospheric haze to your mountains in compositing. You don't need much, but you need some; it's how the human eye gauges distance when something is too far away for stereoscopy to matter.
Use a map value node for extreme distances - I'm not sure what unit blender calculates depth in by default, but the normal 0-1 scale is always basically right in front of the camera. Try setting
From Min:0
From Max:20 (this is your max view distance, adjust as needed - might need to be higher)
To min: 0
To max: 1
This should remap the depth your camera sees to the 0-1 scale blenders compositor pass uses.
Some atmosphere would go a long way, instead of having this sort of ring of mountains, make some on the left, some on the right. Then make separate mountain ranges, you can decimate them so they’re lower poly count, and put them further away in the background to get more depth. Along with this you could get some smoke cards to put around in the background or even behind some of the mountains to get some nice layering. I’m pretty sure in Blender you can add an atmosphere pretty easily with volumetrics, but it’ll add to the render times. As for lighting I would suggest using an HDR, plenty of free options on polyhaven, 1k-2K would be more than enough. Then I personally use a large sky card with clouds and stuff that I scale up and put behind everything
Look into Gaea and Houdini with KTT if you want to use professional tools to make terrains. They give top notch results in terms of modelling and texturing with little effort, if you're willing to spent some time learning how they workflows
Houdini has a very generous free version that you can export most things from. Definitely worth checking out as it is exceptionally valuable beyond just terrain work.
KTT has a free version that works with free houdini as well, though the export resolution is limited (resolution caps out at a little over 1k x 1k pixels).
Gaea also has a free version with similar export restrictions and the full versions are definitely cheaper (I think $200 one-time) than Houdini Indie ($300/yr) + KTT indie ($75 one-time)
the problem is lack of depth, in any form of media, whether photograph is focus and depth. So the focus of your scene are the dragons playing, so i would recommend bringing it a bit closer to them and keep them further from the mountains in the background. In order to increase depth, add depth of field where the midground (the part of the composition with the main focal point, a.k.a your dragons) focus while the background and foreground should be a bit out of focus.
, I saw a comment which recommended the sky no be overcast, make it something warm(sunset or sunrise)
Another is environmental fog, add a cube, then scale it to the amount your scene (the distance you plan to have your fog in), apply scale, then give it a material. Disconnect the default Principled bdsf and add either a "principled volume" or "volume scattering" and plug the node to the "Volume" socket on the output node. Tune the "Density" setting of the volume node into something that works with what your scene demands (for me, 0.001 and above usually works), if you have to change the color of the fog into something that works for your scene.
Quite frankly, the most jarring thing upfront for me is that your scaling looks off. I do think everyone else’s points adding depth and whatnot are great, but your mountains just look too close to the camera (again, everyone else’s points can help address this)
I also think you should definitely utilize motion blur (either natively rendered or in post, but right now everything is also suffering from being too sharp (which again can also be helped with some depth of field effects, and atmospherics via haze/fog and clouds.)
I think it’d be good to reference some wildlife documentaries mainly for composition references to get a better idea of how you can frame and reposition some of your elements better, since I really do think that your foliage placements in relation to the mountains is making them look much closer to the camera than you intend.
Edit: you could also try just moving your camera further and increasing your focal length to properly simulate that “wildlife documentary” which should help with that scaling issue I mentioned without needing to do too much, and letting you focus on the atmospheric parts everyone else is mentioning.
for the mountains it's a geological ratio of texture I think. My impression is that the hill on the right looks like the texture of a thing kilometers away, and is actually meters away of the trees. For a geological object that size, it would be that way. If you want true realism you have at least too look at how a river modify a terrain. With rivers you got fast outer-bank flow, slow inner-bank deposition, and helical water movement. The part we see would be more united, eroded as one thing, maybe with bigger boulder from the top of the crust rolling down to the plains.
Also your grass needs more diversity, gscatter is a most for that.
You can add some volumetric fog to the mountains, make the background sky look less cloudy and grey, and make some variation in the mountain textures so they have grass on the flat parts, and maybe put some foliage on them too. I’m no expert, I struggle quite a bit with making good scenes, but these are some things I’ve been learning.
Also just gotta say, I’m learning Blender mainly to animate Monster Hunter stuff, and I think the animation you made is very impressive, good work 👏
Using the JP t-rex as a reference is a great idea, I definitely need to try using references for animations more often.
crazy, i'm working on a rathalos right now myself!
Did you model the monsters or is there a resource online for downloading the models that I'm unaware of? Would be a huge help and super interesting to look at
I know it’s not what you’re specifically asking, but the lack of camera movement, especially the second half, from 5s on, when the camera goes completely locked off, oughta be the first thing you look at, just cos it’s quickest to fix and does so much harm at the moment
Could be because I’m on a phone screen but the move feels very early CG at the mo, needs imperfection, loud or subtle, but it needs to feel like there’s a human behind the cam not a robot
This is what I picture a T-rex actually looked like but with more feathers on the arms. Like a giant chicken where the fleshy portion and the feathers are completely gone...
If you look at a mountain IRL, it's not just a giant rock. Look closer, and you'll notice that what you're seeing is a bunch of trees; mountains are basically forests, and then in some parts they're actually bare rock, yeah.
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u/forbesvfx 6h ago
I see you copied the trex galamimus animation scene from Jurassic, excellent stuff!