The Island | walkthrough

This winter I was browsing through some photographs and I came across some beautiful images of islands from Polynesia. I am a huge fan of the beach so I started fooling around a bit in Vue to see what I could come out with. I also wanted to test the material painter in the terrain editor so I though it was a nice idea.
I did a first test, a simple beach with a bit of vegetation and I loved the result. Here it is

So I challenged myself to create a complex island scene , and get it to look photoreal without using photgraphy. Let's start the making of with the end result. Here is the final image. Looking cool, right ?

Now let's get down to business. After building the terrain with some nice smooth surfaces going underwater, I started rendering the first passes. I rendered a clean version of the sand and another one with a fractal texture . You can see how I combined the two, especially in the underwater sand.

The next step was refining the sand, and adding the palmtrees. I tried to group the trees in a nice manner, creating an interesting shape. Of course, each cg step was also color corrected to fit the overall ligting conditions and mood of the piece.

I started to create some more beach vegetation in vue using the ecosystem painting tool. This helped me find the right shapes I wanted around the beach, connecting the group of trees.

Then I started fixing some the edges, where the sand meets the water. I wanted some smooth gradients but also sharper edges, to get that realistic variation.

At this point I felt I need to start detailing the beach. I wanted it to feel a bit wild so I rendered some more vegetation from vue and also started painting it in different colors. In the end I was pretty happy with the result.

Then I got to a very interesting point; adding the coral reef. I built some unusual terrain in Vue , resembeing coral formations, and used a cool material to get the look I wanted. I also added displacement to get a nice detailed shape. Here is a closer look at the coral and then you can see it integrated in the image.

I still felt that the beach was a bit cleaner than I wanted it so I render a pass with tons of vegetation everywhere and then started adding it on the beach where I wanted it. This gave a rough and wild look to the shores . I also fixed the distant water, added a few waves, so the island feels a bit more integrated in the ocean.

The last thing I added was a cloud shadow over the island. I fels this would help it gain some realism and I could also make the composition a bit more intereting. It's the kind of thing that you don't notice at first, but it makes a big difference.

So here we are at the final stage. I was quite happy with the result but I fel I wanted to try and crop the image and see what I could come up with. The vertical version looked very interesting, so I decided this was the illustration I was going to show as the result of the process.

Here you can find a nice wide crop that could look good as a wallpaper. ;)

And I also fooled around a bit and created a rough day for night out of my image. I wanted to get a bit of an unusual feeling, so I made the reef as if it's glowing from the inside.

I had a lot of fun creating this image and I hope you enjoyed the making of. If you have any other questions feel free to write an email.


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