Misty Ride

For the love of art and for the unending passion for travelling. I wanted to represent a part of time in life where we are not sure of where we are headed. Everything's foggy yet we see some ray of life. And we go forward with hope that we reach some place beautiful!!

The render was inspired from a WhatsApp status video of a car passing through a misty mountain. Until that time the assets that I have done were some smaller ones and I was looking to do some environment. So I started this one with some basic planning as I could model the road easily and then I can place some mesh with a bit of sculpt for the mountains and I can instance trees on them with MASH in Maya. So I modelled the road first. Then I created a basic camera animation. I imported a car model and added a motion path with a curve. Then downloaded some tree models from internet and done a basic look development. Then I converted the trees as Arnold stand-ins. Then I created some mountain meshes and added MASH instancing on to it. The mountains needed more adjustments from time to time as its shape was the important part in bringing out the variation in the environment as well as in trees. I used a single HDRI image to light the scene. The initial plan was to do it fully foggy, diffused light. I added a preset fog from Maya Paint effects and duplicated and placed it on multiple parts of the scene. I adjusted some noise settings until I got the output I was looking for for the fog. I also added default Arnold environment fog for another layer of detail. Rendered forests, car and fog separately.

While I was doing the comp, I realized that with just the trees and fog, the scene was looking a bit flat. I needed something that tells a better story. So I had this plan to create variation on tree leaf colors with position pass to mask gizmo in nuke. So while I was trying something with it, I noticed that I can create a feeling of sunlight by manually creating patches and adding some exposure and warm color temperature to that part. So I made some parts like its lit with sunlight. I added some pinkish tone to the far away fog parts. So all over the scene was looking much better with better contrast and look. Then I felt that if there is sunlight coming through fog, there must be some volume rays also present in the fog. So I used volume ray node in nuke to create rays and masked it with position mask.

It was wonderful to see how the plan was deviated from the initial plan to something much much more interesting and beautiful. I never expected this.