Who can tell me what is horribly wrong with this picture?

My first attempt at anything resembling realism, but there’s something seriously wrong here.


The first thing that strikes me:
Light in background shining from right to left
Light on person shining from left to right

It is as though you’ve done this before!

Corrected though now my subject is looking out of the frame. Can’t win em all.


Corrected though now my subject is looking out of the frame. Can’t win em all.
Or you flip the background

the shadows on the rocks are too uniform. AO and a better enviroment illumination could improve a bit.

but I like the texture you use on the rocks… is it procedural or an image?

How would I do this? I’m a noob sorta.

It’s an image I use all the time- you can see it in my av also.

are you using Cycles or BlenderInternal?

Blender Render.

I read that for this kind of realistic scenes it is necessary a little more compositing: fog/mist, lens distortion, chromatic aberrations, DOF, etc:
http://www.blenderguru.com/articles/the-1-reason-your-render-looks-fake/

you can check this tutorial… http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5jiVWv_ISqM
there are probably others better than this, but this looks quite simple and straightforrward. :wink:

The thing that strikes me is that all the mountains, bluffs, or whatever you want to call them…they are all the same size and height. It needs some diversity.

https://www.google.com/search?hl=en&site=imghp&tbm=isch&source=hp&biw=1246&bih=746&q=grand+canyon&oq=grand&gs_l=img.3.0.0l10.1448.2729.0.4045.5.5.0.0.0.0.178.736.0j5.5.0…0…1ac.1.51.img…0.5.727.h0nU9z98rNo

Here’s a Google search for the Grand Canyon. You can see in the images… rocks and mountains have layers to them, and they are not very uniform at all.

Excellent both. Thank you.

This rule I intentionally broke. If I do another valley like this, I’ll put more effort into modeling. Really all the rocks are the same shape with some scaling, rotation, and a little subdivision/decimate differences.

For fun. Note to self- set handle type to vector and extrapolation to linear.

Apart from the lighting, shadows etc that have been mentioned above…

The only faults that I can find with it are all connected to the river…

1 - The banks are too uniform, vary the height along the valley floor, add rapids / waterfall.

2 - There appear to be trees growing in the river.

3 - It’s animated (?) this makes it appear that the river is flowing right to left. The original image at the top gave me the impression that the river was flowing left to right.

4 - The canyon floor could do with some variation in height too.

All of these are correct, but my focus was not as much on modeling as on composition and atmospheric perspective compositing.

This one I made my sun lamp more yellow and added some noise:


You can see from my gaggle of blurs and multipliers, I’m varying blur, contrast, noise with z value. There’s also a bit of mist and I turned down the foliage texture.


It looks as if you used a yellowish atmosphere (or wait, did you use any?). Here on earth things in the distance tend to look more blue because of the atmosphere, unless there is a lot of dust, smoke, or something else floating in the air. This is clearly seen in your background photo, actually.

I think what your seeing there is my sun has a slight yellow tint. That background picture was a bit tacked on as I was looking for a nice cloud picture and when I put it in there, I liked the rocky horizon so I left it in there. Had I though about from the beginning(before I did my particle weight paintings and sculpting) I would have planned to show more of it and would have been better planned to compensate for it’s influence. Eh it’s a learning experience.